Training scrum with gamification: Lessons learned after two teaching periods

Ulrich Schäfer

Abstract: Scrum is an agile project management method for modern software, or more generally, product development. Scrum principles are easy to understand, but its different roles, artifacts and meetings need to be trained in practice to ensure participants act appropriately in the course of a larger project. We report on a gamification (or game-based learning) approach to train Scrum to electrical engineering and computer science students using the Minecraft game. The main motivation of the idea is to concentrate on the agile framework itself instead of on software development or engineering issues. In this paper, we describe two teaching periods with approximately 110 students in total at a university of applied sciences. We modified the setup in the second run. We compare the two versions and present a critical discussion including findings and lessons learned from the teaching experiments.