Chapter 7
Serious Games to Support Agile
and Lean Methodologies
H. Tsalapatas, O. Heidmann, and T. Jesmin
Abstract Higher education prepares learners for their future role as professionals
and active citizens by building field specific knowledge as well as soft, transversal
skills. It further prepares students to effectively transition from the educational
environment into the professional world, to become productively integrated into
the professionally community, and to adapt to market-driven processes. To effec-
tively facilitate this transition, higher education offerings must expose students to
industry processes rather than be limited to the development of theoretical knowl-
edge. This exposure may be achieved to a certain degree through specific courses;
more effectively, it may be achieved through the integration of hands on activities
into curricula that challenge students to use new skills and competencies in an envi-
ronment that simulates the way industry deploys knowledge. This work presents the
LEAP learning intervention towards building experience among higher education
engineering students on emerging lean and agile industry practices. This is pursued
through the design and implementation of serious games that allow students to build
experience on the benefits of lean and agile design in broad engineering scenarios
that go beyond the sectors in which these methods were originally introduced.
Keywords Agile design · Lean design · Serious games · Active learning
H. Tsalapatas · O. Heidmann (B )
CTLL Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Thessaly,
Volos, Greece
H. Tsalapatas
e-mail: htsalapa@uth.gr
T. Jesmin
Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
e-mail: jesmin@tlu.ee
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
C. Vaz de Carvalho and M. Bauters (eds.), Technology Supported Active Learning,
Lecture Notes in Educational Technology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2082-9_7
107