An Evaluation of Using a Game Development Framework in Higher Education

This paper describes an application of a game development framework (GDF) - Microsoft XNA in software architecture (SA) course at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and evaluates how well the GDF is to use and integrate in a software engineering (SE) course. The result of the evaluation is based on the questionnaire with 9 types of general questions related to SE learning. In most aspects, the result shows that XNA is a suitable teaching aid in SE learning and can be used to teach SA. It is easy to use and save students time in development, thus let them have more time focusing on the course theory.