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Building LEGO Towers: An Exercise for Teaching the Challenges of Global Work

Published: 07 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Global software engineering has changed the way software is developed today. To address the new challenges, many universities have launched specially tailored courses to train young professionals to work in globally distributed projects. However, a mere acknowledgment of the geographic, temporal, and cultural differences does not necessarily lead to a deep understanding of the underlying practical implications. Therefore, many universities developed alternative teaching and learning activities, such as multi-university collaborative projects and small-scale simulations or games. In this article, we present a small-scale exercise that uses LEGO bricks to teach skills necessary for global work. We describe the many different interventions that could be implemented in the execution of the exercise. We had seven runs of the exercises and report our findings from executing seven runs of the exercise with the total of 104 students from five different courses in two different universities. Our results suggest that the exercise can be a valuable tool to help students dealing with troublesome knowledge associated with global software engineering and a useful complement to the courses dedicated to this subject.

Cited By

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  • (2024)LEGO® for Professional Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewHCI in Games10.1007/978-3-031-60695-3_1(3-21)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Counteracting sociocultural barriers in global software engineering using group activitiesJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.258736:5Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
  • (2022)Structures of Inequity: Teaching Privilege and Oppression with a Tower-Building ActivityTeaching of Psychology10.1177/0098628321105688850:2(119-124)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education
ACM Transactions on Computing Education  Volume 19, Issue 2
Special Issue on Global Software Engineering Education
June 2019
226 pages
EISSN:1946-6226
DOI:10.1145/3303943
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 January 2019
Accepted: 01 March 2018
Revised: 01 March 2018
Received: 01 April 2017
Published in TOCE Volume 19, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Global software engineering
  2. communication and coordination
  3. distributed software development
  4. distributed teams
  5. practical exercise
  6. teaching

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)LEGO® for Professional Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewHCI in Games10.1007/978-3-031-60695-3_1(3-21)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Counteracting sociocultural barriers in global software engineering using group activitiesJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.258736:5Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
  • (2022)Structures of Inequity: Teaching Privilege and Oppression with a Tower-Building ActivityTeaching of Psychology10.1177/0098628321105688850:2(119-124)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2022
  • (2022)Keeping fun aliveProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training10.1145/3510456.3514153(165-175)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
  • (2022)Keeping Fun Alive: an Experience Report on Running Online Coding Camps2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)10.1109/ICSE-SEET55299.2022.9794249(165-175)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2021)Importance of Generic Skills of ICT Graduates—Employers, Teaching Staff, and Students PerspectiveIEEE Transactions on Education10.1109/TE.2020.303495864:3(245-252)Online publication date: Aug-2021
  • (2021)Learning software quality assurance with bricksProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Joint Track on Software Engineering Education and Training10.1109/ICSE-SEET52601.2021.00010(11-19)Online publication date: 25-May-2021

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