Frequent validations of physical product increments play an essential role for Agile Hardware Development (AHD). This paper presents practices for the accelerated embodiment of increments based on the analysis of an AHD project. It describes adaptations of established prototyping strategies for the use of Additive Manufacturing (AM), covering iterative refinement, parallel development, prototyping media change and scheduling of build phases. The application of the practices led to an accelerated embodiment process with mean iteration lengths of 6 days and a first release of a viable product increment within 18 days. By enabling early and frequent validations with tangible increments, the practices facilitate the effective application of AHD in practice.

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Educational games are increasingly used to teach Agile development approaches to practitioners. Most of these training modules simplify the development environment, for example, by using LEGO bricks or playing cards. This oversimplification has been shown to result in limited transferability of learning to industrial practice. Furthermore, there is a lack of teaching modules that specifically address the challenges of applying Agile to physical products. In this paper, we present an open-source educational game that realistically simulates a hardware development project to teach Agile principles. Over 2 days, participants design, manufacture, and test modifications for a physical wire bending machine within an authentic engineering and production setting. The training mimics the typical roles, processes, and tools of industrial engineering teams to reflect the challenges of Agile hardware development. The module was evaluated with 44 industry professionals regarding perceived learning and user reaction. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used for the experimental evaluation. The results showed a positive learning effect as the participants' average agreement with Agile principles increased through the training.Concerning user reaction, respondents reported a high degree of relevance, interaction, and confidence, indicating that the realistic simulation of the hardware development appropriately balanced the degree of realism with simplicity. The study showcases the opportunities of properly aligning game components to provoke learning situations targeted by the instructors. It contributes to the extant literature by providing a design framework (product, process, setting, and instruction) and open-source access to the tools used for implementation.

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