Teaching Requirements Engineering (RE) is challenging, as it involves dealing with the complexity and abstraction of technical and business problems. Students need to learn how to properly identify requirements, document them, validate them, and communicate with various stakeholders, such as clients and technical teams, to understand what needs to be done. Traditional teaching methods often fail to engage students, making bridging theoretical concepts with practical applications difficult. This paper presents the Game Design Storytelling (GDS) process as a framework to gamify educational experiences in RE. GDS integrates narrative-based game elements with learning objectives, offering a structured approach to create interactive and engaging lessons. We applied GDS in an RE class focused on creating user stories using a dystopian narrative set in a fictional world called “Cyberium.” Students were challenged to solve complex problems by developing user stories within this immersive environment. The results indicate that the gamified lesson increased student engagement and facilitated the understanding of technical concepts. The professor reported greater student interest in completing the gamified activity, and the feedback from students was positive, with some stating it was the “best class” they had in their undergraduate program, highlighting the relevance of narrative and interactivity for learning.

Students face several difficulties in introductory programming courses (CS1), often leading to high dropout rates, student demotivation, and lack of interest. The literature has indicated that the adequate use of gamification might improve learning in several domains, including CS1. However, the understanding of which (and how) factors influence gamification’s success, especially for CS1 education, is lacking. Thus, there is a clear need to shed light on pre-determinants of gamification’s impact. To tackle this gap, we investigate how user and contextual factors influence gamification’s effect on CS1 students through a quasi-experimental retrospective study ( \( N = 399 \) ), based on a between-subject design (conditions: gamified or non-gamified) in terms of final grade (academic achievement) and the number of programming assignments completed in an educational system (i.e., how much they practiced). Then, we evaluate whether and how user and contextual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, major, programming experience, working situation, internet access, and computer access/sharing) moderate that effect. Our findings indicate that gamification amplified to some extent the impact of practicing. Overall, students practicing in the gamified version presented higher academic achievement than those practicing the same amount in the non-gamified version. Intriguingly, those in the gamified version that practiced much more extensively than the average showed lower academic achievements than those who practiced comparable amounts in the non-gamified version. Furthermore, our results reveal gender as the only statistically significant moderator of gamification’s effect: in our data, it was positive for females but non-significant for males. These findings suggest which (and how) personal and contextual factors moderate gamification’s effects, indicate the need to further understand and examine context’s role, and show that gamification must be cautiously designed to prevent students from playing instead of learning.

This paper reports on the development process of a 3D strategy game and decision making, for mobile platforms, entitled “Looking for Pets whose objective is to promote the development of logical reasoning, as well as to exercise the abilities of Computational Thinking through a playful process for building algorithms. The elements and mechanics of the game are based on the Cognitive, Load Theory, Multimedia Learning.