Games and Gamification in Software Engineering Education: A Survey with Educators

Abstract

The use of games and game elements in software engineering education is not new. In fact, their use in Software Engineering education is found in research papers since 1974, with a notorious increase after 2000. However, there is little information about the actual adoption of these approaches in software engineering education. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to investigate the use of games and game elements in software engineering education, in the perspective of educators. To achieve this goal, this study proposes and analyzes the results of a survey answered by 88 software engineering professors. We sample the participants by inviting 285 educators mined from one hundred well-stablished universities and educational institutions of different regions of Brazil. The goal of the survey is (i) to collect information about the use of games and gamification in classrooms and (ii) to understand the relation of ACM/IEEE knowledge areas and the used game-related methods. The results show that most of the professors are aware of these educational approaches, the games were adopted by only 21 participants and game elements were only adopted by 19 participants. Games are most used to cover “Software Process” and “Project Management”. The most used game elements are Points, Quizzes, and Challenges. The results also show that the main reasons for not adopting the resources are the lack of knowledge, lack of information about relevant games for teaching software engineering, and the lack of time to plan and include these approaches in the classroom. Finally, results show a positive tendency towards the future adoption of these game-related approaches by the software engineering professors.