Gamification in Software Engineering Education

Gamification has proven to be an adequate approach in various educational environments, from kindergarten and elementary school to higher education classrooms. While it has been extremely effective with school students and standard subjects, such as STEM, when applied correctly, gamification and game-based learning can be applied with older students, even in the information technology and software engineering field. The paper outlines the results based on the experience of applying gamification of education to attract and stimulate student motivation and engagement in class. An approach for including games to teach software engineering methods and concepts is described. Different styles of software engineering games are examined and several of the most appropriate and relevant to the students’ field of study are integrated in the Software engineering course. Descriptions of the games and the planned student progression through them are presented. A collaborative agile team-based approach is implemented and described. A suitable number of student groups have been selected, and the results from surveys held among those students are shown. Conclusions about the improvement of the process are discussed.

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