Sergio Zapata

Teaching Software Engineering from a Collaborative Perspective: Some Latin-American Experiences

Teaching software engineering has been recognized as an important challenge for computer science undergraduate programs. Instruction in such area requires not only to deliver theoretical knowledge, but also to perform practical experiences that allow students to assimilate and apply such knowledge. This paper presents some results of two Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) experiences that involved students of software engineering courses from four Latin American Universities. The obtained results were satisfactory and indicate the reported collaborative activity could be appropriate to address teaching software engineering.

Agile Software Development Process Applied to the Serious Games Development for Children from 7 to 10 Years Old

The development of video games is a complex, multidisciplinary process, which involves different areas as well as a greater number of roles than for traditional software. Serious games face process constraints that concern a number of interactive, educational and psychological factors designed to lead to the fulfillment of educational objectives within a specific context. Based on a case study in the city Cali, Colombia, an iterative and incremental process is proposed, focusing on small and medium development for educational serious games and basing itself on two lines of research: agile development methodology and user-centered design UCD for children from 7 to 10 years. The agile methodology eXtreme Programming XP offers a useful option for the development of serious games as it establishes a continuous communication with all project stakeholders-including the end user-throughout the project, while UCD allows the user profile to be known and identified so that the game will meet the needs and match the capabilities, expectations and motivations of the child.

Effectiveness of traditional software requirement elicitation techniques applied in distributed software development scenarios

In the last years, global software development has grown as a business model and this trend is accentuated. Benefits of these new processes of building distributed software are constrained by difficulties associated with the geographic and cultural distance between team members. In this context, the software requirement elicitation, key activity in the software engineering process, supports perhaps the greatest challenges due to high communicational flow required at this stage of software process. This paper presents a preliminary comparative study of the effectiveness of traditional elicitation techniques applied to distributed scenarios of software construction.

Toward a methodology for serious games design for children with auditory impairments

The design of a serious game depends on number of factors, including collaboration between different actors, context of use, user profile, and game mechanics. This article presents a methodology for the design of serious games for children with hearing impairments, using a Human Interaction Computer (HCI) approach. The proposed methodology has been applied in a study case for children with hearing impairments in the USAER program in Aguascalientes, Mexico, where the experience of children using the ABC- Spanish game in literacy learning is evaluated. The results obtained on evaluating user experience help o identify aspects in the game mechanics, such as the most appropriate device, continuous feedback, challenges, scoring system, and learning levels. Based on an analysis of requirements, user needs are identified in an educational context incorporating a learning style called Fitzgerald Keys. A heuristics set forms a validation model that allows the level of accomplishment of pedagogical objectives of the prototype game to be assessed. The results are positive. The questionnaire responses produced a high score of 80% indicating success in identifying features to be improved and integrated in the methodology.

Evaluating collaboration in CSCL application domain within the CSCW Lab

The CSCW Lab is an environment for evaluating groupware within research groups. Four dimensions in assessing groupware were identified: context, collaboration, usability and cultural impacts. We present a proposal to detail the collaboration level, specifically for CSCL domain applications. The model includes a set of guidelines to evaluate the usage of CSCL tools within a collaboration process defined along with the learning objectives.