Teaching Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture in Practice

Many companies expect their IT developers to understand their business strategy and to specify IT systems that will impact favorably the execution of their business strategy. Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) address these issues. In this paper presents a course that introduces EA and SOA to undergraduate CS students. The course is based on an immersive problem-based pedagogy coupled with role playing. The goal is to have the students conceptualize the theory out of the practical experience they gain in the course. Their experience is developed through a game in which the student teams manage competing companies, specify and then develop an IT system (using workflow and web-services).