A Serious Game for Introducing Software Engineering Ethics to University Students

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ethics-focused storytelling game designed to teach software engineering ethics to university students, demonstrating improved knowledge, positive perceptions, and high usability through empirical evaluation.

Contribution

It presents a novel storytelling game as an educational tool for software engineering ethics and evaluates its effectiveness and usability in a university setting.

Findings

Students improved their knowledge of software engineering ethics.

Students found the game useful and highly usable.

Female students showed greater knowledge gain and higher evaluation scores.

Abstract

This paper presents a game based on storytelling, in which the players are faced with ethical dilemmas related to software engineering specific issues. The players' choices have consequences on how the story unfolds and could lead to various alternative endings. This Ethics Game was used as a tool to mediate the learning activity and it was evaluated by 144 students during a Software Engineering Course on the 2017-2018 academic year. This evaluation was based on a within-subject pre-post design methodology and provided insights on the students learning gain (academic performance), as well as on the students' perceived educational experience. In addition, it provided the results of the students' usability evaluation of the Ethics Game. The results indicated that the students did improve their knowledge about software engineering ethics by playing this game. Also, they considered this game to be a useful educational tool and of high usability. Female students had statistically significant higher knowledge gain and higher evaluation scores than male students, while no statistically significant differences were measured in groups based on the year of study.