Gamification in software engineering education through Visual Novels

Abstract

Gamification is not a new term in the field of education. Visual Novels (VN) are text-based and afford interaction with their users. This work discusses the use of VNs as a gamification approach in software engineering education. VNs tell stories and can, therefore, offer a facilitated introduction to complex topics in higher education. Such a topic is the Waterfall model (WM), a process model for software development. It is lectured within a software engineering course at the University of Applied Sciences, Kempten (Germany). This lecture is taught to the students in form of an online video. In order to familiarize students with this topic, we developed and implemented a learning scenario in form of a VN. The aim of this approach is to motivate students, and thus improve their learning success.