Empirical Study and Vision for a Holistic Serious Game Platform for Software Engineering Education

Serious games are becoming increasingly popular in universities to motivate students. Therefore, more and more lecturers are using game-based learning to encourage students to learn the subject matter. However, using serious games in Software Engineering (SE) lectures at universities is rather challenging as the subject is very practice-oriented and requires special kinds of tasks, e.g., practicing programming, software modeling, etc. Thus, building serious games and integrating such SE-specific tasks is a serious technical challenge and requires immense development effort. Therefore, before developing new games, students' preferences should be analyzed to increase the chances that these games will be played. To address this issue, we conducted an empirical study with 105 students to investigate the requirements and chances for using serious games in SE education in universities. Our analysis shows that students' preferences vary significantly and that there is no clear indication of a single game type that motivates all students equally. Therefore, our second contribution is a vision for a microservice-based Holistic Serious Game Platform for Software Engineering Education, which supports efficiently developing different serious games and integrating SE-specific mini-games and tasks. Hence, our empirical results and the presented approach support advancing research and development of serious SE games and also sensitize game developers to the needs of SE education.