Serious Games to Support Agile and Lean Methodologies

Higher education prepares learners for their future role as professionals and active citizens by building field specific knowledge as well as soft, transversal skills. It further prepares students to effectively transition from the educational environment into the professional world, to become productively integrated into the professionally community, and to adapt to market-driven processes. To effectively facilitate this transition, higher education offerings must expose students to industry processes rather than be limited to the development of theoretical knowledge. This exposure may be achieved to a certain degree through specific courses; more effectively, it may be achieved through the integration of hands on activities into curricula that challenge students to use new skills and competencies in an environment that simulates the way industry deploys knowledge. This work presents the LEAP learning intervention towards building experience among higher education engineering students on emerging lean and agile industry practices. This is pursued through the design and implementation of serious games that allow students to build experience on the benefits of lean and agile design in broad engineering scenarios that go beyond the sectors in which these methods were originally introduced.