A serious game for teaching the fundamentals of ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 systems and software engineering - Lifecycle processes - Requirements engineering at undergraduate level

Abstract In the context of software engineering education, there is a recurrent demand for new approaches and techniques that support the application and transfer of knowledge to real-life situations with the aim of encouraging a more active learning among students. In particular, serious games have recently become an important learning resource for teaching the fundamentals of software process standards at undergraduate level. However, poor effort has been made to create a serious game that supports the teaching of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2011 Systems and Software Engineering – Lifecycle Processes – Requirements Engineering, an international standard that specifies the required processes that are to be implemented by requirements engineering for systems and software products (including services) throughout the lifecycle. With this in mind, a serious game called “Requengin” has been developed to provide undergraduate students with an interactive learning environment to facilitate the introduction of ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2011. The main objective of the game is to strengthen the comprehension and application of the main processes of the standard and some related requirements engineering techniques. Requengin was designed to simulate an academic library where players must apply the requirements engineering processes with the aim of changing the traditional management system by a software system while they receive, at the same time, preliminary training in ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2011. The results obtained by empirical evaluation indicate that Requengin could potentially contribute to an improvement in students’ acquisition of knowledge about ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2011, while also improving levels of motivation.

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