This paper describes an empirical study where the focus was on discovering differences and similarities in students working on development of social applications versus students working on development of games using the same Android development platform. In 2010-2011, students attending the software architecture course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) could choose between four types of projects. Independently of the chosen type of project, all students had to go through the same phases, produce the same documents based on the same templates, and follow exactly the same process. This study focuses on one of projects—Android project, to see how much the application domain affects the course project independently of the chosen technology. Our results revealed some positive effects for the students doing game development compared to social application development to learn software architecture, like motivated to work with games, a better focus on quality attributes such as modifiability and testability during the development, production of software architectures of higher complexity, and more productive coding working for the project. However, we did not find significant differences in awarded grade between students choosing the two different domains. 1. Introduction Computer games and video games have become very popular for children and youths and play a prominent role in the culture of young people [1]. Games can now be played everywhere in technology-rich environments equipped with laptops, smart phones, game consoles (mobile and stationary), set-top boxes, and other digital devices. From this phenomenon, it is believed that the intrinsic motivation that young people show towards games could be combined with educational content and objectives into what Prensky calls “digital game based learning” [2]. Besides an abundant appearance of games in young students life, game development technology has matured and become more advanced [3]. Based on various existing game development environments, the whole duty of game development process can be divided into several expert domains and roles such as game programmer, 3D model creator, game designer, musician, animator, and play writer, and so forth. The process of integrating game content with technology can be simplified through the usage of game engines and available information on the web from various user and expert communities. For instance, Microsoft’s XNA game development kit provides the game loop function to draw and update the game contents, and it also provides convenient
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