Live from RE'08: Learning Research

This morning, Mike and I attended the Learning Research track where we heard 3 research papers presented on the topic of learning.

The first paper was Requirements Engineering Education in the 21st Century, an Experiential Learning Approach by Gil Regev, Don Gause, and Alain Wegmann. I’ll talk more about this one in my next post.

We also saw Gameplay to Introduce and Reinforce Requirements Engineering Practices presented by Renel Smith and Olly Gotel from Pace University. This is based on Renel’s research which lead him to develop a game called RE-O-Poly, to be used to train students on some basic requirements knowledge. In case it’s not obvious from the name, it is based on the game Monopoly. I've been watching Renel's progress on this over the last year and it's nice to see the game growing. I'm certainly a big fan of using games to train, so I think there is some interesting work here.

Finally, Thomas Alspaugh presented Marginal Notes on Amethodical Requirements Engineering: What Experts Learned from Experience by himself, Susan Sim, and Ban Al-Ani. This talk was based on interviews and survey they did in 2006 of various RE’s – what their most important skills were, experience levels, etc. The 5 themes that came out of their feedback were: spanning bridges, communication, selective process, doing less, and business value.