Using Role-play Virtual Environments to Learn Software Design

Object-oriented software design is a kind of black-art that requires a combination of common sense, experience, good taste and the capability to look at a problem from different points of view. According to our experience, these abilities cannot be easily transferred to the students in a lecture. Taking ideas from the way software is designed in industry, according to agile methodologies, we have tried a more active teaching approach using role-play. Students are faced with a design problem and provided with an initial sketchy design, i.e. a number of classes, and several use cases to be solved using those classes. Each student adopts the role of an object and each use case is executed through message passing between the objects represented by the students. This way, the students have the chance to, at their own pace, evaluate the consequences of a given design and test their ideas with the other actors in play. The good results obtained during the empirical evaluation of this active learning approach have motivated us to transfer our teaching methodology to virtual environments. Using our previous experience developing game-based learning environments and taking ingredients from the interface and gameplay of first-person shooters and sport games, we have designed a role-play virtual environment (RPVE) that intends to maintain, and even reinforce, the benefits of role-play in the classroom. We developed ViRPlay3D, a RPVE to understand object-oriented software behavior. It supported a single player, included a simple metaphor and did not allow the modification of CRC cards. Nowadays, we have completed the specifications of ViRPlay3D2, an extension of ViRPlay3D for, both, understanding and creating object-oriented designs. ViRPlay3D2 is a multiplayer environment where students mimic the classroom role-play sessions. The students are immersed in the environment using a first-person view that simulates the point of view of the objects that participate in the role-play. The students can modify the proposed design and the simulation is recorded for a further evaluation.