Gamify 2023 – Proceedings

Gamification to Ignite Learning in Modern Times (Keynote)
Beatriz Marín
(Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)
Modern times reflect an interconnected world thanks to globalization and technology, which provide higher economic and societal integration, and stimulate technology transfer and knowledge sharing. This challenges the educational landscape demanding new teaching and learning approaches. Teaching complex concepts, such as computer science topics, requires engaging students with the practice of the contents for successful learning. Gamification and serious games have demonstrated their importance to deal with the lack of self-motivation in students when learning. In this keynote, different approaches that we have used to improve the motivation and learning effectiveness of software engineering students will be presented. After that, the keynote will focus on lessons learned and future research directions that deserve attention from the community.

Publisher's Version

Session 1

UMLegend: A Gamified Learning Tool for Conceptual Modeling with UML Class Diagrams
Christian Cagnazzo, Giacomo Garaccione, Riccardo Coppola, Luca Ardito, and Marco Torchiano
(Politecnico di Torino, Italy)
Conceptual modeling is a fundamental skill for analysts and software engineers, as it is necessary for abstracting concepts and expressing them in a meaningful way that can then be translated into effective software design. Conceptual modeling is taught in different Software Engineering university curricula, with Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram being one of the most commonly used notations for this purpose. This paper presents a proposal for the Gamification of conceptual modeling education in a university environment. We describe a tool prototype with common gamified mechanics such as experience points, levels, and customizable avatars, together with an underlying evaluation system for assessing the correctness of the diagrams modeled by the students. A preliminary assessment on existing lab assignments was performed to gauge the ability of detecting errors. We discuss the tool capability and the potential benefits that such a tool could bring, as well as envision future plans for an empirical evaluation of those benefits.

Publisher's Version

Session 2

Revise That Again: Are You Motivated?
Naomi Unkelos-Shpigel, Barak Berencwaig, and Sharon Kas
(Braude Academic College of Engineering, Israel)
Requirements engineering (RE) presents several challenges stemming from the required collaboration and knowledge transfer between analysists, developers, and customers. Motivation theories have been used occasionally to analyze and encourage motivation and engagement of stakeholders in RE tasks. In recent years, gamification techniques have been used in software engineering tasks, and specifically, in RE tasks in order to promote stakeholder engagement. However, existing research works seldom offer a rigorous method for designing gamification environments for RE tasks. This paper describes a socio-technical environment, which was built for requirements elicitation and specification. This environment allows researchers and team managers to decide on different mechanisms to gamify the current RE task in practice. The environment was evaluated by experts and was further tested with the participation of students in two proof of concept studies for demonstrating its functionality, yielding some anecdotic results.

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Gamified Virtual Reality for Computational Thinking
Lorenzo Gerini, Giorgio Delzanno, Giovanna Guerrini, Fabio Solari, and Manuela Chessa
(University of Genoa, Italy)
In Computer Science Education, coding activities are extremely important to teach younger students the basics of programming and computational thinking. To provide an immersive experience, in this paper, we propose VRCoding, a Virtual Reality (VR)-based block coding system. VRCoding can teach computational thinking in an immersive Virtual Reality environment, exploiting passive haptics to improve interaction and give tactile feedback to the users. Passive haptics is obtained using simple physics placeholders, i.e., textured parallelepipeds, that are tracked in real-time, and aligned with the coding blocks in VR. The system is tested on a group of secondary school users, performing simple coding exercises with a standard monitor-based block coding environment and with the proposed VRCoding block language. Results show positive feedback concerning the sense of presence and the user experience.

Publisher's Version

Is ChatGPT Capable of Crafting Gamification Strategies for Software Engineering Tasks?
Tommaso Fulcini and Marco Torchiano
(Politecnico di Torino, Italy)
Gamification has gained significant attention in the last decade for its potential to enhance engagement and motivation in various domains. During the last year ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art large language model has received even more attention both in the field of scientific research and in common use by individuals or companies. In this study, we investigate the possibility of adopting ChatGPT as a tool for designing gamification platforms in the Software Engineering domain. Leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT, we assess how good is it at generating effective suggestions and ideas for designers or developers. To evaluate ChatGPT's potential as a gamification platform creator we narrowed the context to one particular Software Engineering activity, asking for possible aspects of the activity to be gamified. Each proposed aspect was subsequently unraveled by ChatGPT both asking in a shared and separate context, first following the conversational nature of the model, then applying a validated design framework. The study assesses ChatGPT's ability to select and integrate game elements to build a thriving gamification environment by framing the design of the platform to a state-of-the-art conceptual framework. To evaluate the goodness of the design choices made we relied both on the Octalysis framework and on personal experience. The findings of the papers show that ChatGPT can only create simple playful experiences not very effective. Although, by instructing the model with more specific desired mechanics and dynamics, it is possible to guide it toward the application of the ideas suggested. We argue that ChatGPT is not capable of building a gamified environment on its own, but it could still be used to build the foundation of a gamification platform as long as the designers refine and rough out the advice gained from a user-centered solution.

Publisher's Version

Session 3

Cyber Range and Cyber Defense Exercises: Gamification Meets University Students
Enrico Russo, Marina Ribaudo, Alessandro Orlich, Giacomo Longo, and Alessandro Armando
(University of Genoa, Italy)
In the last decade, gamification has emerged as a valid alternative to more traditional learning processes both in academia and for professional training. Gamification has been successfully implemented in various disciplines to enhance the enjoyment and engagement of learning. This result can be achieved by providing challenges and quests, incentivizing task completion, and using role-playing games where learners assume different roles and perform tasks within a story format. In the case of cybersecurity, gamification can be introduced thanks to Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions or within virtual environments known as Cyber Ranges, where participants can test their skills on simulated networks, ICT systems, and other critical infrastructures. In this paper, we describe our experience with a cyber defender training activity proposed to computer science and computer engineering students. We organized lectures on cybersecurity, oriented towards developing problem-solving and practical skills. Then, we introduced gamification by running two on-site competitions: a Jeopardy CTF and a Cyber Defense Exercise.

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Gamification in Test-Driven Development Practice
Wei Ren
(Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
The challenge of effectively developing and sustaining high-performance professional development practices in software engineering education is one that must be addressed. Test-driven development (TDD), an example of a key professional practical activity, is strongly linked to these high-performance practices. To examine the effects of gamification - the use of game design elements in a non-game context - on motivating students to develop and sustain TDD practice, an experiment was conducted and utilized ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to analyze the data. This experiment showed that gamification motivates students to do high-performing TDD practice. More specifically, gamification changes the individual's TDD behavior, increases engagement in the development activity, and the effect continues for a longer period even after gamification has ceased. Furthermore, a positive association between gamification and the maintainability of the team codebase was supported by the data.

Publisher's Version

PlayTest: A Gamified Test Generator for Games
Patric Feldmeier, Philipp Straubinger, and Gordon Fraser
(University of Passau, Germany)
Games are usually created incrementally, requiring repeated testing of the same scenarios, which is a tedious and error-prone task for game developers. Therefore, we aim to alleviate this game testing process by encapsulating it into a game called Playtest, which transforms the tiring testing process into a competitive game with a purpose. Playtest automates the generation of valuable test cases based on player actions, without the players even realising it. We envision the use of Playtest to crowdsource the task of testing games by giving players access to the respective games through our tool in the playtesting phases during the development process.

Publisher's Version

Gamify 2023 – Proceedings

2nd International Workshop on Gamification in Software Development, Verification, and Validation (Gamify 2023)

Frontmatter

Keynote

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3