A Serious Game for Mobile Phones used in a Software Engineering Course: Usability Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness

Serious games play an important role in an individual's training and have been used for many educational purposes. In the context of this work, an educational game was developed which is called “My life as a software engineer” and focuses on technological as well as ethical dilemmas that software engineers may face during their careers. This game was used as an educational tool for the “Software Engineering” course in the Computer Engineering Department of the University of Patras. By playing this serious game, students had the opportunity to encounter situations and challenges related to the software engineering work environment. The game was found usable by the students and had a statistically significant learning effect as revealed at the pre-test and the post-test analysis. The data analysis also showed gender differences for usability as perceived by the students.