Learning project management skills through game programming

Engineering training programmes commonly integrate project management skills as a legitimate subject for training competent graduates [7], [5]. Since a few years, this topic has been expanding to lower academic degrees. The challenge is then to combine students' limited technical competences with management requirements and entrepreneurial skills (work experience, staff planning, feedback and even product promotion). The French institutes of technology (such as Grenoble IUT) provide undergraduate technical degrees in different technical specialities with two-year training programmes. In 2013, the programme of the Network and Telecommunication speciality [4] was modernised in this way to :1) introduce project management aspects with 20 hours of lectured training and 30 hours per student of personal work; 2) take into account high-level programming languages and mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, ...): 60 hour training must cover the basic algorithmic principles (procedural programming using Python language) but also the operating principles of the applications letting clients query server services. In this paper, we propose to describe the pedagogical approach we adopt to combine these two goals: students work in pairs for 12 weeks and experiment the programming process by developing a game (namely the Battleship) with given technical specifications. This approach offers two major learning points: gaining skills on programming: students are motivated with a fun basic application [3]. Then they are invited to add gaming options with respect to their abilities and with increasing programming complexity (including graphical interface or network gaming service); placing students in a professional situation: student work is driven by well-documented functional specifications and demonstrator programs. Specifications split the project development into four stages with fixed deadlines. Students are in charge of work assignment using classical project management tools and professional collaborative work systems (Gantt diagram and Subversion source version control system [1]). The proposed project is detailed based on our three-year teaching experience focusing on the pedagogical progression, the advantages of IT project management tools and the skills learned by students after this first practical experience.