Enhancing a gamified tool for UML modeling education

TL;DR

This paper describes the enhancement of a gamified UML modeling educational tool, expanding its support to include use case diagrams and improving its modular architecture for future extensions.

Contribution

The paper introduces an improved, modular version of UMLegend that supports multiple UML diagrams, including use case diagrams, based on experimental feedback.

Findings

Enhanced UMLegend now supports use case diagrams.

Refactored architecture facilitates adding new modeling topics.

Potential for improved long-term student engagement and performance.

Abstract

Unified Modeling Language (UML) Use Case and Class Diagrams are fundamental modeling notations in Software Engineering (SE) education due to their importance for requirements and model-based engineering, yet their relevance is underestimated by students, who tend to dismiss the topic as secondary. Gamification has been adopted to make modeling education more appealing, but existing tools focus almost exclusively on class diagrams, leaving support for use cases and other notations unexplored. In 2025, we designed UMLegend, a gamified tool for class diagrams that offered dynamic feedback to help students learn correct modeling practices and multiple long-term mechanics to increase engagement, and performed a study with the tool. With this paper, we describe how we enhanced UMLegend following the results of the experiment so that it can support more modeling languages, with use case diagrams being added to the type of available exercises in the tool. The revised version has been refactored to have a modular architecture, to make it easier to add other software engineering topics and additional modeling notations. We also describe the potential impact we expect the new version to have, and outline a longitudinal study we intend to perform in 2026 where we will assess whether long-term UML gamification leads to improved student performance.