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.

严肃游戏（Serious Games）在高校中愈发流行，旨在激发学生的学习动力。因此，越来越多的高校讲师采用基于游戏的学习（game-based learning）模式，引导学生掌握课程内容。然而，在高校软件工程（Software Engineering，简称SE）课程中应用严肃游戏颇具挑战：该学科实践性极强，需开展编程练习、软件建模等特定实践任务。因此，开发适配SE场景的严肃游戏并集成此类专属任务，是一项极具难度的技术挑战，需投入大量开发资源。因此，在开发全新游戏前，应先分析学生的偏好，以提升游戏的实际使用率。为解决这一问题，本研究针对105名高校学生开展了实证研究，旨在探究在高校SE教育中应用严肃游戏的相关需求与落地可行性。分析结果显示，学生的偏好存在显著差异，并无单一游戏类型能够同等激励所有学生。据此，本研究的第二项贡献是提出了面向软件工程教育的、基于微服务（microservice）的全景式严肃游戏平台愿景，该平台可支持高效开发各类严肃游戏，并集成SE专属的迷你游戏与实践任务。综上，本研究的实证结果与所提出的方案，有助于推动SE严肃游戏的研发进程，同时也能促使游戏开发者关注SE教育的实际需求。