With his students in the Project Management module, who are in their third semester of the Applied Informatics degree program, Thomas Klauer organized an approximately 3-hour Lego Scrum workshop with the IT consultancy bridgingIT from Frankfurt to teach agile procedures in IT project management.
Using the example of a Lego city, the students were instructed to implement a project in an agile manner using the Scrum method. Divided into three groups, they each had the task of building a part of the city. They implemented the prewritten user stories in several sprints of seven minutes each. Each sprint was planned in a sprint planning session and evaluated after implementation in a sprint review and a sprint retrospective. During implementation, the groups had to coordinate with each other to form interconnecting edges and swap components.
In actual software projects, a sprint usually lasts two weeks. Software is developed that is delivered after each sprint in the form of a functional (partial) product. Among other things, the students learned about the Scrum roles – Scrum Master and Product Owner – and got a bit closer to the agile mindset, such as welcoming changes, understanding mistakes as learning opportunities, and focusing on the customer.
A big thank-you to the company bridgingIT, which, after a short introduction of the company, held the workshop with four colleagues at Mainz University of Applied Sciences.
