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Simsoft is a serious game-one that trains or educates-at the centre of a research project designed to see if and how games can contribute to better software engineering management education by helping software engineers and project managers explore some of the dynamic complexities of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. A necessary precursor for this project was to establish what games already existed in the field and how effective they had been. To this end a systematic review of the literature was conducted using a collection of online science, engineering, education, and business databases looking for games or simulations used for educational or training purposes in software engineering or software project management across any of the SWEBOK knowledge areas. The initial search returned 243 results, which was filtered to 36 papers by applying some simple quality and relevance inclusion/exclusion criteria. These remaining papers were then analysed in more depth to see if and how they promoted education in the field of software engineering management. The results showed that games were mainly used in the SWEBOK knowledge areas of software engineering management and development processes, and most game activity was in Europe and the Americas. The results also showed that most games in the field have learning objectives pitched at the first rung of Bloom's taxonomy (knowledge), most studies followed a non-experimental design, and many had very small sample sizes. This suggests that more rigorous research is needed into the efficacy of games in teaching software engineering management, but enough evidence exists to say that educators could include serious games in their courses as a useful and interesting supplement to other teaching methods.

All Interii%tranet commercial and industrial iippliccm"ons need a stable and secure computer and nehvork in$wstructure. l%is infrastructure is typicaliJ a large, heterogeneouspopul~"on of networkedPCS that need to be managed by a specialist support group. Market analysis clearly indicates that these specialists n-eed a pori$olioof skills and knowledgenot supplied by tradition accreditedcomputerscience courses. Although Edith Cowan University (ECU) was recerdi'ygranted level 1 re-accreditati"on of its Computer Science Degree by the Australian Computer SocieQ it was clear that, on completionof their studies,their graduatescould not desig% install, maintain or manage a netwur?xdpoputi"on of P(Ys to a professional st&rd with due regard to safe~, both to themselves and the equipment. Further, it was noted that the current degree provides fm options to study Health & Safe~, Law and Technology, Finance or Human Resource Management -issues thut a graduate must address in prepar~-on for a professional career in computer and network management. hdic~"ons are that this is also the case within other universitiesin Australia and the UK l%is paper proposes a new competency based curricuhu%referenced10interndonal practices and am-cdated to non-university educ~"onal programs, to meet market need Thispaper also presezts resultsfiom the implement~-onof part of this curriculum Perrbion to make digital/had copy of aII or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided thst copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantsge, the copyright notice, the title of the pubficstion and its date appew, and notice is given that copying is by pe.rm-ksion of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on serwrs or toredii"bute to fists, requires prior specific perm"wion andjor a fee. ACSE98, Brisbane QLD AUSTRALIA.

In response to real and perceived short-comings in the quality and productivity of software engineering practices and projects, professionally-endorsed graduate and post-graduate curriculum guides have been developed to meet technical developments and evolving industry demands. Each of these curriculum guidelines identifies better software project management skills as critical for all graduating students, but they provide little guidance on how to achieve this. One possible way is to use a serious game -a game designed to teach and educate players about some of the dynamic complexities of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. This paper presents the results of a qualitative research project that used a simple game of a software project to see if and how games could contribute to better software project management education. Initial results suggest that suitably-designed games are able to teach software engineering and project management concepts at higher-order Bloom taxonomy levels.

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