Gamification in SE Courses

Abstract

The sources and styles of student motivation have changed as the use of computing technology has become more ubiquitous. Instructors observations often lead to the conclusion that students’ attention span has shorten. Nevertheless, these students often focus for long periods of times on games, both video games and board games. The thesis of this research is that gamification techniques can be used to increase students’ motivation in learning various aspects of software engineering. Furthermore, by exploiting certain types of games, we hypothesize can increase the interest and motivation of female software engineering students. The research described herein is a work in progress to examine these hypotheses in the context of teaching in a specific area of software engineering: software testing.