Abstract:

This paper deals with a role-play based teaching concept and experimental evaluation of a virtual reality room for the purpose of improving an academic software engineering course at example of requirements engineering.

Requirements engineering is one fundamental step in developing a software project. It captures the desired attributes and functionality of the later product. Thus, the main task for a requirements engineer is to capture the stakeholders’ wishes correctly and schematically for the team.

We teach requirements engineering as part of a software engineering course. The course in question is targeted towards electrical engineering majors. At the given moment, it is unclear whether this affects our research. Currently, we focus on formulating and evaluating requirements at given artificial scenarios. However, our students claim the content being too abstract and theoretical and thus hard to grasp.

We think applying a realistic use case respectively a task setting might reduce the difficulties in understanding the learning content for our students.

Rather than providing overly artificial tasks, it is our approach to confront our students with more realistic scenarios to work on. We want to train our students on a more practical level and therewith increase their extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for requirements engineering by confronting them with realistic stakeholders. This approach is already proceeded, e.g. [1], where they invite “real” customers/stakeholders to their lecture. Students then are asked to note the requirements of those stakeholders.

We want to enable this teaching scenario also for settings where a live role-play scenario is not feasible, e.g. due to capacity reasons. In order to realize this, we developed a virtual reality (VR) room with different stakeholders to construct an immersive environment for our students. Furthermore, VR enables learning independent of learning locations and additionally prevents distractions. With this room, we created a completely new learning experience.

We contribute with a first prototype for the virtual reality room. We thereby focus on the room design itself that includes also the design of new learning tasks and auxiliary means, based on current literature on defining learning goals and the design of learning tasks. Furthermore, an evaluation concept is presented. Besides usability evaluation, performance and motivation are the variables of interest to us.

References:
[1] Georg Hagel, Martina Müller-Amthor, Dieter Landes, and Yvonne Sedelmaier. Involving customers in requirements engineering education: Mind the goals! In Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference of Software Engineering Education, ECSEE’18, pages 113–121, New York, NY, USA, 2018. ACM.

Keywords:

Software engineering education, virtual reality, learning tasks, academic education.