4 research outputs found
Having Fun in Learning Formal Specifications
There are many benefits in providing formal specifications for our software.
However, teaching students to do this is not always easy as courses on formal
methods are often experienced as dry by students. This paper presents a game
called FormalZ that teachers can use to introduce some variation in their
class. Students can have some fun in playing the game and, while doing so, also
learn the basics of writing formal specifications in the form of pre- and
post-conditions. Unlike existing software engineering themed education games
such as Pex and Code Defenders, FormalZ takes the deep gamification approach
where playing gets a more central role in order to generate more engagement.
This short paper presents our work in progress: the first implementation of
FormalZ along with the result of a preliminary users' evaluation. This
implementation is functionally complete and tested, but the polishing of its
user interface is still future work
IMPRESS: Improving Engagement in Software Engineering Courses through Gamification
Software Engineering courses play an important role for preparing students
with the right knowledge and attitude for software development in practice. The
implication is far reaching, as the quality of the software that we use
ultimately depends on the quality of the people that make them. Educating
Software Engineering, however, is quite challenging, as the subject is not
considered as most exciting by students, while teachers often have to deal with
exploding number of students. The EU project IMPRESS seeks to explore the use
of gamification in educating software engineering at the university level to
improve students' engagement and hence their appreciation for the taught
subjects. This paper presents the project, its objectives, and its current
progress
Code Critters: A Block-Based Testing Game
Learning to program has become common in schools, higher education and
individual learning. Although testing is an important aspect of programming, it
is often neglected in education due to a perceived lack of time and knowledge,
or simply because testing is considered less important or fun. To make testing
more engaging, we therefore introduce Code Critters, a Tower Defense game based
on testing concepts: The aim of the game is to place magic mines along the
route taken by small "critters" from their home to a tower, such that the mines
distinguish between critters executing correct code from those executing buggy
code. Code is shown and edited using a block-based language to make the game
accessible for younger learners. The mines encode test inputs as well as test
oracles, thus making testing an integral and fun component of the game
A Metric Framework for the Gamification of Web and Mobile GUI Testing
System testing through the Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a valuable form of Verification & Validation for modern applications, especially in graphically-intensive domains like web and mobile applications. However, the practice is often overlooked by developers mostly because of its costly nature and the absence of immediate feedback about the quality of test sequence. This paper describes a proposal for the Gamification of exploratory GUI testing. We define - in a tool and domain- agnostic way - the basic concepts, a set of metrics, a scoring scheme and visual feedbacks to enable a gamified approach to the practice; we finally discuss the potential implications and envision a roadmap for the evaluation of the approach