Abstract
This paper describes an empirical study where the focus was on discovering differences and similarities in students working on development of social applications versus students working on development of games using the same Android development platform. In 2010-2011, students attending the software architecture course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) could choose between four types of projects. Independently of the chosen type of project, all students had to go through the same phases, produce the same documents based on the same templates, and follow exactly the same process. This study focuses on one of projects—Android project, to see how much the application domain affects the course project independently of the chosen technology. Our results revealed some positive effects for the students doing game development compared to social application development to learn software architecture, like motivated to work with games, a better focus on quality attributes such as modifiability and testability during the development, production of software architectures of higher complexity, and more productive coding working for the project. However, we did not find significant differences in awarded grade between students choosing the two different domains.
Highlights
Computer games and video games have become very popular for children and youths and play a prominent role in the culture of young people [1]
If we look at the domains the students chose we see that 51% chose game development, 30% chose social applications, and 19% chose robot controller
Besides the introduction of a new COTS-Android in a software architecture course, the goal of this paper is to identify the difference output of same COTS and get evaluation result to answer the four research questions
Summary
Computer games and video games have become very popular for children and youths and play a prominent role in the culture of young people [1]. Games can be played everywhere in technology-rich environments equipped with laptops, smart phones, game consoles (mobile and stationary), set-top boxes, and other digital devices From this phenomenon, it is believed that the intrinsic motivation that young people show towards games could be combined with educational content and objectives into what Prensky calls “digital game based learning” [2]. Microsoft’s XNA game development kit provides the game loop function to draw and update the game contents, and it provides convenient game development components to load the different format of graphics, audio, and videos This makes it possible for game fans such as students with or without programming background to modify existing games or develop new games. They can design and implement their own game concepts with these game creation tools, learn the developing skills and relevant knowledge, and accumulate related practical experience
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