Experimental Evaluation of a Serious Game for Teaching Software Process Modeling

Abstract

Software process modeling (SPM) is an important area of software engineering because it provides a basis for managing, automating, and supporting software process improvement (SPI). Teaching SPM is a challenging task, mainly because it lays great emphasis on theory and offers few practical exercises. Furthermore, as yet few teaching approaches have aimed at teaching SPM by introducing innovative features, such as games. The use of games has mainly been focused on other areas of software engineering, for example software project management. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper describes a formal experiment carried out to assess the learning effectiveness of a serious game (DesigMPS), designed to support the teaching of SPM, and to compare game-based learning with a project-based learning method. In the DesigMPS game, the student models a software process from an SPI perspective, based on the Brazilian SPI model (MPS.BR). The results indicate that playing the game can have a positive learning effect and results in a greater degree of learning effectiveness than does the project-based learning instructional method.