Abstract:

Teaching students about architectural design decision making in the context of software-intensive systems is not trivial, due in part to the 'wicked' nature of the digital architecture design, and to the lack of exposure to representative design situations. In earlier work, we've reported on the design and use of DecidArch, a table top card game that we've successfully been using for several years in the Digital Architecture (and previously Software Architecture) course at the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) to address three main learning objectives: (1) create awareness about the rationale involved in design decision making, (2) enable appreciation of the reasoning behind candidate design decisions proposed by others, and (3) create awareness about interdependencies between design decisions.

The pandemic prompted us to set up an online version of the game. Obviously, we could no longer play it as a physical card game, but we wanted to keep the game as part of the course given that student surveys consistently showed the contribution of the game to our learning objectives. The requirements that we had (fast delivery in order to be ready for the upcoming course; free to use for our students i.e. no licensing, subscription or purchase fees; and consistency with the table top game so no change in game dynamics) led to the development of a simple card game engine built with Google Sheets. The online version of the game has been used in several courses, with surveys showing comparable achievement of the game's learning objectives as the table top version.

We have made the online version of the DecidArch game and the accompanying game engine available as open source. The cards in the game can easily be adapted to address different learning situations, and the game engine is adaptable to suit alternative game dynamics. We welcome the use of our game and the adaptation of our game engine for other courses.

Keywords:

Online learning, Game engine, Card game, COVID-19, Open source.