Game-based learning (GBL) is widely utilised in various domains and continues to receive interest and attention from researchers and practitioners alike. However, there is still a lack of empirical evidence concerning its effectiveness, making GBL evaluation a critical undertaking. This paper proposes an integrated approach for planning and executing GBL evaluation studies and presents its application by evaluating the effectiveness of a GBL approach to improve the Arabic reading skills of migrant refugee children in an informal learning setup. The study focuses on how children’s age group, learning modality preference, and prior mobile experience affect their learning, usability, and gameplay performance. A quasi-experiment with a one-group pretest-posttest design was conducted with 30 children (5–10 years old) from migrant refugee backgrounds. The results show a statistically significant improvement in their reading assessment score. The results also outline a clear impact of children’s age groups on their learning gain, usability score, and total levels played. Moreover, learning modality preference and prior mobile experience both had a statistically significant effect related to usability and gameplay performance parameters. However, no effect was found on learning gain. Based on the findings, some design recommendations are suggested for more inclusive design focusing on user characteristics.

This keynote talk focuses on teaching children through innovation and interaction with technology, and the presentation will focus on experiences from two highly successful technological innovations: EduApp4Syria and Kahoot!. EduApp4Syria, was an international innovation competition launched by the Norwegian government with the goal of creating the best game-based learning apps to help Syrian children to learn their mother tongue. The initial competition resulted in 78 bids from companies based in 31 countries. The end results of the competition were two innovative game-based learning apps that have a proven positive effect on learning and psychosocial learning. The second part of the talk will focus on experiences and research on children's interaction with Kahoot!. Kahoot! is a game-based learning platform invented at NTNU which has reached in 2017 70 million monthly active users, and is currently the fastest growing learning brand in the world. You can read more about EduApp4Syria at: http://norad.no/eduapp4syria and more about Kahoot!at: http://kahoot.com.

Today game engines are popular in commercial game development, as they lower the threshold of game production by providing common technologies and convenient content-creation tools. Game engine based development is therefore the mainstream methodology in the game industry.

Software development faces challenges from high expectation of software qualities, complexity of software and long development cycle. While Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) is helping developers overcome many of these challenges in many domains, it is not generally applied in the computer game domain. DSM can be hard to apply in the computer game domain because of the complexity of computer game domain knowledge and the peculiarity of traditional computer game development process. Without fully understanding these issues and properly solving them, the strength of DSM approaches will be constrained and game developers will be reluctant to use DSM. In this article, we investigate the development process and explore the feasibility of fitting DSM tasks in traditional computer game development in a compact way to lower cost and improve software quality. We introduce the workflow and illustrate the usage of it by presenting a case study. Further, we discuss the benefits and costs of involving DSM solutions in computer game development. Finally, we present the limitations and future work.

Although Domain Analysis (DA) is important for Model Driven Development (MDD), traditional DA methods are demanding and not practical in many situations. When computer games are developed, game design (problem domain) is usually decided in a gradual way within iterations where software prototypes are constructed and playtest are performed. In such a case, it is not practical to fit a heavyweight DA in the highly iterative process. Researchers indicated that vocabularies were expected to automate game design. Such vocabularies can be reused in another form in DA tasks. In this research, the authors developed an ontology and a DA procedure based on it. To evaluate them, theoretical analysis, case studies, and a user acceptance survey were used. The results indicated that the ontology met the general requirement as a domain vocabulary, and it enhanced the DA process in an expected way. Most of external potential users (46 in total) considered the ontology useful and easy to use.

We present a summary of the 3rdICSE Workshop on Games and Software Engineering: Engineering Computer Games to Enable Positive, Progressive Change in this article. The full day workshop is planned to include a keynote speaker, panel discussion, and paper presentations on game software engineering topics related to requirements specification and verification, software engineering education, re-use, and infrastructure. The accepted papers are overviewed here.

In this paper we have evaluated the main functionalities of NetEm, a popular Linux based network emulator, which we have used to stress test the performance of the Games@Large distributed gaming system. We have performed a number of tests on different NetEm functionalities in order to evaluate their practical performance conformity and validity versus the NetEm description and theoretical expectations. We have found that the NetEm behaviour conforms to expectations for the emulation of delay and packet loss without correlation. However, in the case of jitter emulation, the actual realized jitter is lower than the given input value. It is an important fact to be aware of when using NetEm for different application testing. This paper also provides a baseline methodology for network emulation tool validation.

This article describes an extensive evaluation of introducing a game project to a software architecture course. In this project, university students have to construct and design a type of software architecture, evaluate the architecture, implement an application based on the architecture, and test this implementation. In previous years, the domain of the software architecture project has been a robot controller for navigating a maze. In 2008, the students on the software architecture course chose between the two domains: Khepera robot simulation in Java and XNA game development in C#. Independent of the domain chosen, the students had to go through the same phases, produce the same documents based on the same templates, and follow exactly the same process. This article describes an evaluation where we wanted to investigate if a game development project could successfully be used to teach software architecture. Specifically in the evaluation, the effect of the choice of COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) and domain is compared in relation to popularity of the project type, how the students perceive the project, the complexity of the software architectures produced, the effort put into the project, and the grades achieved for the project and the written examination. The main conclusion is that game development projects can successfully be used to teach software architecture. Further, the results of the evaluation show among other things that students who chose the Game project produced software architecture with higher complexity, and put more effort into the project than the Robot project students. No significant statistical differences were found in final grades awarded to the Game project students vs. Robot project students. However, the Game project students obtained a higher grade in their project than in the written examination, whereas the Robot project students scored higher in the written examination than in their project. Finally compared to the Robot project students, those that chose the Game project had fewer problems with COTS hindering the architecture design and introducing technical challenges.

This paper describes an application of a Game Development Framework (GDF) - Microsoft XNA in software architecture (SA) course at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and evaluates how well the GDF is to use and integrate in a software engineering (SE) course. The result of the evaluation is based on the questionnaire with 9 types of general questions related to SE learning. In most aspects, the result shows that XNA is a suitable teaching aid in SE learning and can be used to teach SA. It is easy to use and save students time in development, thus let them have more time focusing on the course theory.

This paper describes an evaluation of a new game concept, Lecture Quiz, which can be used in lectures in higher education to promote strong student participation and variation in how lectures are taught. The lecture game uses the equipment and infrastructure already available in lecture halls like the teacher’s portable PC, a large screen and a video projector, network connections, and the students’ mobile phones. The main game runs on the teacher’s portable PC projected on a large screen, whereas the students will interact with the game using their own mobile phones. Lecture Quiz is a multiplayer quiz game, which offers a variation in game modes where unlimited number of players can play simultaneously. Games like Lecture Quiz are most useful for testing and rehearsing theory. As a bonus, the teacher will get quantitative data on how much of the theory the students actually have learned. The evaluation of Lecture Quiz was performed in a software architecture lecture where twenty students first played the game and then were asked to fill in an evaluation form. The focus of the evaluation was on usability of the system and the perceived usefulness of using Lecture Quiz in lectures. The results of the evaluation show that Lecture Quiz was easy to use and that it contributed to increased learning. Further, Lecture Quiz was perceived as entertaining, and half of the students claimed they would attend more lectures if such systems were used regularly.

This paper describes experiences from implementing an experimental mobile peer-to-peer application called Peer2Schedule aimed at improving and supporting collaboration where people are collocated. Peer2Schedule was built on top of the Peer2Me framework that provides management of mobile ad hoc networks over Bluetooth. The goal of the Peer2Schedule project can be divided into three main areas. 1) To develop a collaborative peer-to-peer application to evaluate the usefulness of such applications; 2) to evaluate the technical limitations of J2ME and Bluetooth in this domain; and 3) to implement and evaluate a mobile application to improve present ad-hoc collaboration. In this paper we also investigates the social and network issues related to such applications. Our findings indicates that Bluetooth and J2ME are useful technology to implement such applications, but the long time to establish connections and security issues in Bluetooth reduce the usability of such applications. In addition, it is essential that collaborative peer-to-peer applications must be developed as open source projects, to allow the users of such applications to evaluate the source code to assess how the application handles privacy. Finally, the paper elaborates on how the problem domain affects how the control-flow is managed in peer-to-peer applications.

This paper reports experiences from an experiment in a software architecture course where the focus was both on giving students valuable education as well as getting important empirical results. The paper describes how the experiment was integrated in the course, and presents an evaluation of the experiment from an educational point of view. Further, the paper reflects on the costs and the benefits of carrying out an experiment in the context of a software architecture course for the involved stakeholders namely the researchers, the students, and the instructors. We also describe some guidelines for planning and executing experiments as a part of a software engineering course.

This paper explores how software developers debug integrated systems, where they have little or no access to the source code of the third-party software the system is composed of. We analyze the practice of debugging integrated systems, identifying five characteristics that set it apart from existing research on debugging: it spans a variety of operating environments, it is collective, social, heterogeneous, and ongoing. We draw implications of this for software maintenance research and debugging practice. The results presented in this paper are based on observations from an ethnographic study of the Gentoo OSS community, a geographically distributed community of over 320 developers developing and maintaining a software system for distributing and integrating third-party software packages with different Unix versions.

This paper presents an educational method used to improve teaching of tedious topics in software engineering courses that can be difficult for students to comprehend without any reference to own practical experience. The method utilizes the students existing software engineering knowledge to understand new theory, methods, and techniques. The goals of the method are to improve student participation in the lectures and to enable the students to think through the topics on their own before giving answers and explanations. The method allows the students to learn in three different settings: Individually, in groups, and in class. This paper describes experiences using the method, and proposes how it can be used in software engineering courses

This paper investigates how maintainability can be established in system integration (SI) projects where maintainers have no direct access to the source code of the third-party software being integrated. We propose a model for maintainability in SI focusing on post-release activities, unlike traditional maintainability models where focus is on pre-release activities. Our model describes maintainability as a process characterized by ambiguity and negotiation that is supported through an infrastructure of debugging and coordination tools. Further, we describe how the process going from a software failure to establishing the fault causing the failure can be managed in SI. The results presented in this paper are based on observations from an ethnographic study of the Gentoo open source software (OSS) community, a large distributed volunteer community of over 320 developers developing and maintaining a software system for distributing and integrating third-party OSS software packages with different Unix versions

This paper presents experiences and results from using the post mortem analysis (PMA) method to evaluate student projects in a software architecture course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The PMA gave students an opportunity to evaluate their own work as well as evaluating the project as a whole. The results of the analysis revealed several positive and negative issues related to the project that could be used to improve the course for the next year. We also discovered that the PMA gave us a much more detailed evaluation than the more traditional form-based course evaluations. In addition, the students found the PMA method a useful and practical way of summarizing and learning from a project since the students got to practice the PMA method, they can also bring this software process improvement practice out to companies when they start working in the IT-industry

A way to learn about Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products is to define a set of characteristics or attributes and then to collect information about these attributes. In an industrial context, the attributes used to select COTS clearly depend on project specific goals. In our educational context we made an attempt to define general COTS characterization attributes. The resulting framework provides a structure, which facilitate the learning process. Our proposed attributes have several similarities with the generic evaluation attributes defined by ISO 9126. A comparison with such a standard provides a deeper insight into the problem of characterizing COTS products.

The cooperative aspects of software engineering have often been either eliminated or ignored, because it has been to hard to model cooperative activities in existing systems, or there has not been an interest for doing so. This paper describes the CAGIS process centred environment (PCE) that initially has been designed for modelling and providing support for cooperative software processes. The CAGIS PCE consists of three main parts: A simple activitybased workflow tool, a software agent system and a process middleware that glues the workflow tool and the software agent system. The paper describes the overall architecture and each part of the system.

The ability to handle changes is a characteristic feature of successful software projects. The problem addressed in this paper is what should be done in project planning and iterative replanning so that the project can react effectively to changes. Thus the work presents research results in software engineering, as well as transfer of methods in knowledge engineering to software engineering, applying the AI planning technique to software process modeling and software project management. Our method is based on inter-project experience and evolution patterns. We propose a new classification of software projects, identifying and characterizing ten software process evolution patterns and link them to different project profile. Based on the evolution patterns, we discuss the planning support for process evolution and propose several methods that are new or significantly extend existing work, e.g. cost estimation of process changes, evolution pattern analysis, and a coarse process model for the initial planning and the iterative replanning process. The preliminary results have shown that the study of evolution patterns, based on inter-project experience, can provide valuable guidance in software process understanding and improvement.

This paper presents a case study of Norwegian banking software house where the objective is to adopt a categorization framework for managing evolution in software projects to identify project profiles and evolution patterns, and to suggest improvements to better support frequent evolutions.Based on an analysis of collected evolution data from an ongoing case study, we elaborate a QIP-inspired method and own techniques to evolve corresponding process models in our Process-centered Software Engineering Environment, called EPOS.The method describes also how to synthesize and reuse evolution experience from completed projects to improve planning and estimation in new similar projects.The collected data demonstrates that requirement changes which are detected in later development phases, are major causes for cost overruns in the studied organization.