Evaluating the Effectiveness of Board Game Usage to Teach GSE Dynamics

When preparing students for an industrial or academic career in software engineering, educational institutions need to address the globally distributed character of the software engineering profession. As it will be difficult to have students actually participating in a real-life, multi-site, globally dispersed, industrial project and thus acquiring knowledge from experience, there is a challenge to properly prepare students for their future jobs. One way to teach the dynamics of global development is by letting students participate in a game in which these dynamics are primarily addressed. In this paper a board game is presented that can be used for such a purpose. The paper presents a description of the game and the findings from a controlled experiment to explore its learning effects.