MOTIVATION-BUILDING PATTERN USING GAME-BASED LEARNING FOR INTRODUCING THE IMPACT OF THEORETICAL SUBJECTS IN PRACTICAL SCENARIOS TO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Nowadays, in graduate degree programs with a high technological profile, subjects not including this profile usually suffer an initial lack of motivation from the students. Based in our experience as lecturers of Computer and Software Engineering Degrees, we have observed that students strongly connect the practical aspects learnt in a course with the impact of them in their future professional career. If a subject has a strong theoretical character or its practical component is complex enough for being introduced into the classroom, the students tend to underestimate the importance of the subject. This fact causes an observable lack of motivation by the students during the lectures. In these scenarios, if this issue is not addressed adequately, it is likely that the lack of motivation remains until the end of the term.

Lecturers do not always devise the effective way to attack this problem using traditional methods or their own know-how. Complementary, innovative and unconventional learning methods offer several techniques able to tackle these situations. However, not all lecturers have knowledge about the existence of these techniques or how to apply them in an effective way to specific topics.

We consider that learning activities using innovative techniques such as game, experiential and problem based learnings can help to effectively communicate the importance of the theoretical subjects in degrees with a high technological profile. Moreover, if these learning activities are generalized in order to extract a formal structure to be adapted and applied into several related subjects, they can serve as useful tools for other lecturers without previous experience in the use of these techniques. This generalization process can be expressed as a systematic definition of a learning activity (described as a pattern) taking into account not only the conceptual part and the good practices of the learning activity but also the collected experience during its application in real classroom scenarios.

In this context, we propose a motivation-building pattern that uses game-based learning and can be easily adapted into concrete Software Engineering subjects. These subjects are characterized by a strong theoretical character or a practical component that is complex enough for being introduced into the classroom. Taking as a source of inspiration the structure offered by the patterns utilized in software design, we have defined the following structure for our pattern proposal: the learning objectives, the description of the learning or motivation problem to solve (i.e. applicability), the participants, the methodological strategy, the evaluation technique for the results, the mise-en-scene (i.e. the template for the description, configuration and adaptation of the pattern to other related subjects), and finally, the template for the students’ answer sheet.

The motivation-building pattern proposed in this manuscript is the obtained result of a generalization process over a game-based learning activity carried out for a Requirement Engineering and Modelling course that was taught in the Software Engineering Degree at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. We show that the results obtained when this pattern was applied not only in this specific subject but also in other related subjects have been extremely promising.