An Experience Report on Teaching Scrum Principles in a Playful Way through Distant Collaboration with Online Whiteboards

The COVID-19 pandemics forced classroom activities to be moved to an online setting. This sudden transition to emergency online teaching brought negative impacts to students worldwide, who had a significant decrease in aspects such as motivation, self-efficacy, and cognitive engagement. Social aspects were also affected due to a lack of classroom socialization, with almost no interaction with teachers or colleagues. Experimental approaches attempting to engage students have been explored to minimize these negative impacts. We report our experience of conducting an activity with that objective, involving two cohorts of students in their first semester of a Bachelor's degree in Information Systems. They have never had any face-to-face contact and started their course under this emergency remote teaching format. We chose to use a playful approach to teach Scrum, an agile method of iterative and incremental product delivery that uses frequent feedback and collaborative decision making. Our goal was twofold: (1) teaching Scrum through a playful approach and (2) stimulating students to interact and socialize among themselves and with the teacher. Based on our previous classroom practice of adopting Lego4Scrum, a widespread method for Scrum training that uses LEGO®bricks, we adapted it to use an online whiteboard (Miro) with the support of a communication tool (Discord) for teams. We conducted pre-and post-activity surveys in combination with an open-ended questionnaire that helped us to have a snapshot of the students understanding of the main concepts presented in the activity. We also performed interviews with some students after the activity to understand their perception and the social impact it had. © 2022 ACM.

A Playful Approach to Learn Scrum through Distant Collaboration using Online Whiteboards

We present an approach for teaching introductory Scrum concepts through a playful online collaborative activity. It was conducted with 1st-semester students who never had any in-person contact and started their course under emergency online teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. We adapted the Lego4Scrum approach and instead of plastic bricks, we combined an online whiteboard (Miro) with a communication tool (Discord) for teams. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Successful Models of Hackathons and Innovation Contests to Crowdsource Rapid Responses to COVID-19

To help fighting the many adversarial effects that the COVID-19 pandemic brought, many initiatives supported by public, private and non-governmental organizations are crowdsourcing the development of solutions through hackathons and innovation contests. This article discusses the models and common aspects of two successful initiatives led by governmental institutions that used a crowdsourcing approach to foster solutions aiming at pandemic-related issues: the EUVsVirus (Europe) and the MPLabs COVID-19 Challenge (Brazil). © 2020 ACM.

Online Hackathons as an Engaging Tool to Promote Group Work in Emergency Remote Learning

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educational activities had to be done remotely as a way to avoid the spread of the disease. Instead of shifting to an online learning model, it consisted of a transition to what was called Emergency Remote Teaching. This is a strategy to keep activities going on until it is safe again to return to the physical facilities of universities. This new setting became a challenge to both teachers and students. The lack of interaction and classroom socialization became obstacles for students to continue engaged. Before the pandemic, hackathons - short-lived events (1 to 3 days) of intensive collaboration to develop software prototypes - were being explored as an alternative venue to engage students in acquiring and practicing technical skills. In this paper, we present an experience report on the usage of an online hackathon as a resource to engage students in the development of their semester project in a distributed applications course during this emergency remote teaching period. We describe the intervention and analyze the students' perspective of the approach. One of the findings was the importance of the Discord communication tool - used by students for playing games - which helped them socialize and be engaged in synchronous group work, "virtually collocated". © 2021 ACM.