Serious Games For Promoting Agile Industry Practices To Engineering Higher Education

Agile design refers to flexible processes in which design and implementation of a product are not separate process, but rather they are interleaved. Design is revised throughout product development aiming at a final product that best meets the needs of targeted users. Agile design is useful when product user requirements are not fully understood or when they emerge gradually throughout the implementation process. While agile design is typically applied in software engineering, its principles of ensuring a product that best addresses customer expectations through iterative development of disposable prototypes has applicability in wider engineering sectors. Project LEAP [2] promotes the linking of engineering higher education learning to industry practices, and specifically, agile design, with the objective of facilitating a smoother transition of students from the academic environment to the world of work. The project designs and develops serious games that encourage learners to adopt industry roles related to agile design processes, to think critically for addressing community and societal needs through agile engineering solutions, and to practice on the application of industrial process management in the context of wide learning activities. Recognizing the importance of supporting educators on integrating the proposed innovative learning methods and tools into their teaching practices LEAP further develops good practice guidelines and instructor support content. The outcomes will be validated in real-life contexts in classrooms in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Estonia, and the UK.