Experience on using a virtual world for software engineering projects

In teaching software engineering, it is often interesting to introduce real life scenarios for students to experience and to learn how to collect information from respective clients. The best arrangement is to have some real clients willing to spend time to provide their ideas of a target system through interviews and Q&A sessions. However, this arrangement cannot be scaled up as it demands too much resource. Second Life (SL), a well-known 3D online virtual world, not only applied its simulative and social networking capabilities on entertainment and leisure aspects, but also in the field of education. Starting from 2008, we have introduced SL into a software development student project with 2 courses involved, which are Human Computer Interface and Foundations of Database Systems, and this arrangement has been practiced for 3 times. The presence of SL acts as an online platform for students to access and acquire user requirements from staff (AI robots) of a virtual company, through a series of interviews, for system development. The roles of SL are twofold: to reduce the operational overheads in the project administration and to allow students to gain more hands-on experiences through working on a simulated real-life business cases. Hence, student could learn how to apply their knowledge and understand the software development process in the real business world. In this paper, we would like to report our experience and results of using SL in the software engineering student projects. With the help of the student feedbacks and comments on the application of SL, their learning experience as well as the student attitude towards this kind of innovation learning could be analyzed. Furthermore, the problems and the difficulties encountered during project period will be discussed for future enhancement.