Can a Team Coordination Game Help Student Software Project Teams?

Team-based student projects in beginning software engineering courses are often the first place that students have tried working on a team to develop a shared software product. For this reason, team coordination and communication skills are probably very important to their team success. We have access and experience with a research training game named TeC, developed to improve team coordination in disaster response teams, and hypothesized that it might help student software teams. We ran a course experiment where we used the training game as a treatment, and a generic board game as a control. With only 8 teams in the course available to participate, and 6 ultimately completing the experiment, statistical results are inconclusive. Nevertheless, interesting outcomes were obtained that indicate potential benefit of such a training game, and we believe this argues for more research in the area.