What is Dragons Out?

Dragons Out Oy is my company that creates books, exercises, and training especially for introducing software testing to children, and adults, too.

The main concept is a book about software testing for kids, where the storytelling technique is used. In practice, I tell fantasy stories about dragons, which come to bother villages, towns, and castles. Knights and also normal villagers including a few kids oppose the dragons and manage to kill them or scare them away. They want dragons out of their lives.

After each chapter, I explain how events in that chapter relate to the software testing world. So dragons are bugs. Knights are testers and developers. Villagers are software users. Each chapter has a different dragon, in the same way as a software tester will find different types of bugs/defects in software. I’ve taken the parallel so far that the characteristics of a dragon resemble characteristics of the bug/defect. Each chapter includes vocabulary, where I explain the software testing terms as simply as possible.

See a sample of the book in English including Introduction and Chapter 1.

Check out and add Dragons Out! book reviews at Kirjasampo and Goodreads.

The awesome illustrations of dragons and knights, created by Adrienn Széll, bring the stories alive helping children to understand the stories. The dragon and knight characters will come back in other forms of learning products after the book. 

BookAuthority Best New Software Testing Books



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amazing feedback and school visits

Image
 I recently got some  amazing feedback  from a 9-year-old reader through his dad. The Dragons Out book was an exciting Christmas present that the boy started reading on his own. He did the exercises at the end of the chapters and was really thrilled about them ("I did all of those great exercises!"). Upon asking why the book was so thrilling, he answered, "It was a great book because it had true things and fantasy side by side, and the exercises were fun!". It feels so good to hear such feedback - keep it coming! The unique approach of fantasy coupled with testing works. Remember my school visits, earlier? It is  again time to have school visits in Finland , too. It is especially nice now that face-to-face meetings are possible, and I don't need to access the school class virtually over a Teams meeting. That works too, yes, with a teacher facilitating in the class, but it is so much nicer and more concrete to meet and teach children face-to-face. I asked for som...
Read more

Article in Dimensio-magazine

I recently had a chance to write in the magazine of math teachers. Mathematics is one of the natural stepping stones towards software development and software testing. The association of math teachers (MAOL) has been interested in cooperation with me. They considered software testing to be an interesting angle for anyone interested in mathematics. I wrote about my book writing project and how software testing can be taught to children via a fantasy book. The article is in Finnish here: https://www.dimensiolehti.fi/opetetaan-lapsille-ohjelmistotestausta-fantasiakirjan-avulla/
Read more

AI creating Dragons and testing stories

Image
In recent times, it seems like the whole world has gone crazy trying to use Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence). These LLMs (large language models) can create content based on user prompts.  Now I tried the LLM Brave Leo (Mixtral) to create a Dragons Out -like story for me. Although it was just experimental, the results are quite impressive. I used just three prompts. Finally, I tried to get a picture of all this - a fourth prompt. It didn't work, but I got a description, which I used in a prompt of a picture generation AI, Deep AI.  Did you learn something from the below? I think an LLM can help with quality like this. But the picture was quite disappointing to me. Anyway, I think I'll write my own stuff also in the future and ask Adri for more fantastic illustrations. Me: What is RPG? Brave Leo: RPG stands for "Role-Playing Game." It is a type of game where players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting and engage in activities to develop their ch...
Read more