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ABC-Sprints: adapting Scrum to academic game development courses

Published: 19 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We propose a course design that fits a practical game development project into a regular game design lecture course. As this approach requires a consistent structure, our concept proposes an adaption of Scrum that is based on the game development life-cycle: ABC-Sprints consist of three Sprints to iteratively create Alpha, Beta and Completed versions of a game. We present a detailed walkthrough of the course and give results of a formal evaluation. These indicate that ABC-Sprints help students to manage their workload and to increase productivity over time. Consequently, three teams each presented a game at the end of the course that technically exceeded typical outcomes of game projects without lectures. We hence encourage to apply ABC-Sprints to other curricula and provide a set of recommendations.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '10: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
June 2010
306 pages
ISBN:9781605589374
DOI:10.1145/1822348
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Microsoft: Microsoft
  • SASDG: Society for the Advancement of the Study of Digital Games

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 June 2010

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Author Tags

  1. Scrum
  2. XNA
  3. curriculum
  4. education
  5. game development
  6. games
  7. team projects

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  • Research-article

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FDG '10
Sponsor:
  • Microsoft
  • SASDG

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Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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  • (2021)Software Development Methodologies, HEIs, and the Digital EconomyEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1102007311:2(73)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2021
  • (2018)Measuring students' attitudes toward information technologyJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3199572.319958633:4(101-102)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2018
  • (2018)GencyberscrumJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3199572.319958133:4(60-68)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2018
  • (2018)New Research Perspectives on Game Design and Development EducationProceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts10.1145/3270316.3271550(703-708)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
  • (2016)Interdisciplinary Projects in the Academic StudioACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/273215716:2(1-24)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2016
  • (2016)Effectiveness of Game Jam-based iterative program for game production in JapanComputers & Graphics10.1016/j.cag.2016.07.00661(1-10)Online publication date: Dec-2016
  • (2014)Leveraging scrum principles in collaborative, inter-disciplinary service-learning project courses2014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) Proceedings10.1109/FIE.2014.7044087(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2014
  • (2013)Using Management Methods from the Software Development Industry to Manage Classroom-Based ResearchCases on Emerging Information Technology Research and Applications10.4018/978-1-4666-3619-4.ch019(373-385)Online publication date: 2013
  • (2013)Using scrum to teach software engineering: A case study2013 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2013.6684866(455-461)Online publication date: Oct-2013
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