A Systematic Survey of Games Used for Software Engineering Education

Abstract

Simsoft is a serious game-one that trains or educates-at the centre of a research project designed to see if and how games can contribute to better software engineering management education by helping software engineers and project managers explore some of the dynamic complexities of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. A necessary precursor for this project was to establish what games already existed in the field and how effective they had been. To this end a systematic review of the literature was conducted using a collection of online science, engineering, education, and business databases looking for games or simulations used for educational or training purposes in software engineering or software project management across any of the SWEBOK knowledge areas. The initial search returned 243 results, which was filtered to 36 papers by applying some simple quality and relevance inclusion/exclusion criteria. These remaining papers were then analysed in more depth to see if and how they promoted education in the field of software engineering management. The results showed that games were mainly used in the SWEBOK knowledge areas of software engineering management and development processes, and most game activity was in Europe and the Americas. The results also showed that most games in the field have learning objectives pitched at the first rung of Bloom's taxonomy (knowledge), most studies followed a non-experimental design, and many had very small sample sizes. This suggests that more rigorous research is needed into the efficacy of games in teaching software engineering management, but enough evidence exists to say that educators could include serious games in their courses as a useful and interesting supplement to other teaching methods.

Utilizing online serious games to facilitate distributed requirements elicitation

“…The term serious games, which has become increasingly popular during the last decade, refers to games with a set of cognitive properties [37] that provide individuals with new ways of thinking and transferring knowledge [42]. As has been suggested by Zyda [43], application of "games and simulations technology to non-entertainment domains … results in serious games."…”

“…As has been suggested by Zyda [43], application of "games and simulations technology to non-entertainment domains … results in serious games." Such games have been increasingly used for educational and training purposes in various fields, including management, defense, healthcare, and software engineering [42,44]. Serious games are mainly used to assist individuals in developing different skills such as communication, collaboration, problem solving, and decision making [44].…”

Proposal to Teach Software Development Using Gaming Technique

“…Relating Gaming Habits with Student Performance in a Gamified Learning Experience [13] The study performed in a small sample of students that caused one of the student types to have as few students, so, this makes it difficult to drawn any major conclusions from the study 3D game-based learning system for improving learning achievement in software engineering curriculum [14] This study lacks evaluation criteria to fill with the learning motivations of students Improving the Quality of the Software Development Lifecycle with Gamification [15] The study needs for more studies to clear and answered some question that not answered here Towards a Serious Game to Teach ISO/IEC 12207 Software Lifecycle Process: An interactive learning approach [16] The study based on the limited number of experts, so more research should be conducted to evaluate the benefits of the proposed game. A Systematic Survey of Games Used for Software Engineering Education [17] The limitation of the study that it didn't follow a true experimental design and used very small sample sizes. A systematic survey for games used in software engineering management education has been presented [17] to show how games can improve education by helping software engineers to explore the complexity of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment.…”

“…A Systematic Survey of Games Used for Software Engineering Education [17] The limitation of the study that it didn't follow a true experimental design and used very small sample sizes. A systematic survey for games used in software engineering management education has been presented [17] to show how games can improve education by helping software engineers to explore the complexity of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. The result of the study was that the students enjoyed playing the games and gained value from the experience and that the educators of software engineering courses must consider using games as a part of teaching.…”

ProDecAdmin: A Game Scenario Design Tool for Software Project Management Training

“…Regarding the scope of serious games for training SPM, there are a limited number of games available (Caulfield, Xia, Veal, & Maj, 2011;Calderón & Ruiz, 2015;Petri & von Wangenheim, 2017), with well-known examples being: SimSoft , SimSE (Navarro & Hoek, 2004), X-MED (Von Wangenheim, Thiry, & Kochanski, 2009), DELIVER! (Von Wangenheim, Savi, & Borgatto, 2012).…”