Building LEGO Towers: An Exercise for Teaching the Challenges of Global Work

• Published in: ACM transactions on computing education Vol. 19; no. 2
• Main Authors: Šablis, Aivars, Gonzalez-Huerta, Javier, Zabardast, Ehsan, Šmite, Darja
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2019
• Subjects: Active Learning; Classroom Communication; College Students; Communication Skills; Computer Science Education; Computer Software; Cooperative Learning; Educational Objectives; Global Approach; Learning Activities; Skill Development; Teaching Methods; Toys
• ISSN: 1946-6226; 1946-6226
• DOI: 10.1145/3218249

Global software engineering has changed the way software is developed today. To address the new challenges, many universities have launched specially tailored courses to train young professionals to work in globally distributed projects. However, a mere acknowledgment of the geographic, temporal, and cultural differences does not necessarily lead to a deep understanding of the underlying practical implications. Therefore, many universities developed alternative teaching and learning activities, such as multi-university collaborative projects and small-scale simulations or games. In this article, we present a small-scale exercise that uses LEGO bricks to teach skills necessary for global work. We describe the many different interventions that could be implemented in the execution of the exercise. We had seven runs of the exercises and report our findings from executing seven runs of the exercise with the total of 104 students from five different courses in two different universities. Our results suggest that the exercise can be a valuable tool to help students dealing with troublesome knowledge associated with global software engineering and a useful complement to the courses dedicated to this subject.