The groupthink specification exercise

Teaching students to read and write specifications is difficult. It is even more difficult to motivate specifications - to convince students of the value of specifications and make students eager to use them. This paper describes the group-think specification exercise. Groupthink is a fun group activity, in the style of a game show, that teaches students about specifications (the difficulty of writing them, techniques for getting them right, and criteria for evaluating them), teamwork, and communication. Specifications are not used as an end in themselves, but are motivated to students as a means to solving realistic problems that involve understanding system behavior. Students enjoy the activity, and it improves their ability to read and write specifications. The two-hour, low-prep activity is self-contained, scales from classes of ten to hundreds of students, and is freely available to other instructors.