Alejandro Calderón

Universidad de Cádiz | UCA · Department of Computer Engineering

Software testing is an essential knowledge area required by industry for software engineers. However, software engineering students often consider testing less appealing than designing or coding. Consequently, it is difficult to engage students to create effective tests. To encourage students, we explored the use of gamification and investigated wh...

Digital games are considered an effective and efficient instructional strategy for computing education. However, there are few empirical studies providing sound evidence on the benefits of such educational games. In this respect, the objective of this chapter is to present a comprehensive analysis in order to summarize empirical evidence on the ben...

Gamification is a potential approach to foster motivation and engagement in different contexts which popularity in recent years has encouraged its application in a diversity of domains, including health, education, business, society, or tourism. However, although all their promising benefits and rapidly developing, the gamification community should...

Gamification has rapidly emerged as one of the favorite persuasive technologies widely used with the aim of promoting a positive change in the user’s behavior by means of including game-like elements in non-game contexts. As a research discipline, gamification is growing fast, maturing from basic and fundamental questions such as what and why gamif...

En la formación en Ingeniería del Software se observa una demanda de nuevos enfoques de aprendizaje que permitan modernizar el proceso tradicional de enseñanza y adaptarlo a los procesos de aprendizaje de las nuevas generaciones de alumnos. El uso de experiencias formativas basadas en gamificación, juegos serios y simulación es un enfoque que permi...

Driven the necessity of providing alternative approaches to the traditional pedagogical teaching process, the use of gamification and serious games has become a successful approach to motivate, engage and be effective for the current generation of learners. Considering the advantages of serious games, our work describes the experience of using a se...

Despite the importance that computer thinking and programming have in the industrial field currently, the majority of the students consider that these competences have no relevance within their degrees, which causes absenteeism, lack of interest, and reduces the motivation and the engagement of the students within the related courses. Therefore, th...

In recent years, an increasing interest has been observed in the development and use of simulations, serious games (SGs) and gamification strategies to teach software project management (SPM) in a highly practical way. The current SGs for SPM have a quite specific scope, are not able to provide and dynamically change game scenarios during the life...

Driven by the need to provide more hands-on opportunities to computing students, educational digital and non-digital games have been used as an instructional strategy for teaching Software Project Management (SPM). However, a question that arises is to which regard the expected benefits of these games are real. Thus, the objective of this study is...

Non-digital educational games (board and card games, paper & pencil, etc.) are also being used for computing education. However, there are few empirical studies providing sound evidence on the benefits of this kind of games. Consequently, a question that arises is to which regard the expected benefits of these games are real. Thus, the objective of...

Digital games are considered an effective and efficient instructional strategy for computing education. However, there are few empirical studies providing sound evidence on the benefits of such educational games. In this respect, the objective of this chapter is to present a comprehensive analysis in order to summarize empirical evidence on the ben...

The development of personal and social skills of information technology students is a relevant task that can promote the employability of future computing professionals. In order to promote the importance of these skills and help students in their development and improvement, a workshop was organized based on serious games. Two serious games were a...

Context: In recent years the interest in using serious games for software engineering, software process, software project management and software process standards education has increased significantly. The ISO 21500 standard is an international reference standard that provides generic guidance and good practices in project management. Objective: T...

Context: The interest in the use of serious games as learning resources for software process standards education and training has increased significantly in recent years. Objective: The main purpose of this work is to record, analyze and characterize the state of the art related to serious games for software process standards education with the goa...

Context: Gamification has been proven to increase engagement and motivation in multiple and different non-game contexts such as healthcare, education, workplace, and marketing, among others. However, many of these applications fail to achieve the desired benefits of gamification, mainly because of a poor design. Objective: This paper explores the c...

Support groups’ agents are a very important element of IT service incident management process, and to increase their motivation and commitment, to improve their skills and to modify their behaviors is fundamental for improving the process and meeting the business objectives. Gamification, the application of game elements in non-game contexts to mod...

Bringing professional practice into the learning/teaching process is an especially difficult task in the scope of software project management and can turn into a challenge in the context of software process standards education. The ISO 21500 standard is an international reference standard that provides generic guidance and good practices in project...

Teaching Software Project Management (SPM) for Information Technology (IT) learners is a relevance issue. The necessity of teaching SPM in a highly practical way moves trainers towards the use of new methods and techniques such as simulations, serious games or gamification strategies. The majority of the existing serious games for SPM do not offer...

The ISO/IEC 29110 standard aims to assist and encourage Very Small Entities (VSEs) in understanding, adopting, assessing and improving their software processes to their specific needs. Although the integration of international software standards in VSEs is a relevant topic, the learning/teaching process is a considerable challenge for industrial tr...

La necesidad de formar en dirección y gestión de proyectos software de una forma práctica junto a las preferencias en el aprendizaje de las nuevas generaciones de alumnos requiere que los formadores adopten nuevos métodos de aprendizaje y los integren en el proceso de aprendizaje/enseñanza con el fin de motivar a los alumnos durante su formación y...

Curriculum guidelines for IT learners need to be aligned with the current generation of students, the so-called millennials, own features and style of learning. It is necessary explore ways of adapting the teaching/learning process, the methods, the techniques and the resources we use, to reach them and teach them more effectively. Computer-based s...

El objetivo principal de este trabajo es estudiar los conocimientos que giran en torno al ámbito de los juegos serios y la simulación para la formación en dirección y gestión de proyectos software, con el fin de proponer una solución efectiva a la necesidad real que surge en la formación práctica de este área de conocimientos. Además, se propone un...

The topic of commitment in software process improvement (SPI) has been a recurrent topic of research that has not received enough attention in the recent years. In many situations, the lack of commitment in SPI initiatives is appointed as the major cause leading to failure. In this paper, we propose the use of simulation-based process functional pr...

The highly theoretical methodology, in which software engineering is frequently taught, causes that learners usually lose their interest in learning software engineering. This study introduce SmartProject, a learning environment based on serious games and social networks to teach and motivate learners in software engineering, and evaluates its educ...

La dirección y gestión de proyectos software es un área de gran relevancia a tener en cuenta por los profesionales del sector, en el camino para alcanzar el éxito en la realización de los proyectos software. Debido a ello, de igual o mayor importancia debe ser la formación que los futuros profesio-nales reciben en dicha materia. No obstante, podemo...

La formación que reciben los futuros profesionales en dirección y gestión de proyectos software es un tema de gran relevancia a tener en cuenta en el sector de la educación. La revisión sistemática de la literatura que se presenta en este trabajo persigue analizar y resumir el estado del arte actual de los diferentes métodos y procedimientos usados...

La formación en proceso software es un tema de gran relevancia a tener en cuenta por los profesionales de la industria de la ingeniería del software en el camino hacia el desarrollo de software de calidad con éxito. Sin embargo, los estudios realizados muestran como dicha formación es altamente teórica y en la mayoría de los casos suele impartirse...

Software process is a very important area of knowledge that supports software development. However, we can observe a lack of methods and tools that allow teaching software process in a highly practical way and attached to the software development learning. In this paper, we analyze the software lifecycle process groups of the ISO/IEC 12207 and the...

El aprendizaje integrado de contenidos y lengua es esencial para el perfil profesional del ingeniero del software. Dicho aprendizaje debe realizarse de manera práctica y llevando a cabo experiencias de la vida real. Tomando como base el principio de que 'el nivel de interactividad dentro de un ambiente de aprendizaje es lo que impulsa dicho aprendi...

Training that future practitioners receive in software project management is a topic of great importance. The objective of this systematic literature review is to summarize the current state of the art of the different methods and procedures used to assess serious games. The review follows a predefined procedure that involves automatically searchin...

This paper describes the approach we followed to integrate content and language learning in an undergraduate subject of the Software Engineering degree at the University of Cadiz. Based on the principle that ‘the level of interactivity within a learning environment is what drives learning’, our experience was aimed at the design and use of interact...

La dirección y gestión de proyectos software es un área de gran relevancia a tener en cuenta por los profesionales del sector, en el camino para alcanzar el éxito en la realización de los proyectos software. Debido a ello, de igual o mayor importancia debe ser la formación que los futuros profesionales reciben en dicha materia. No obstante, podemos...

Nowadays, we can observe a lack of tools that allow teaching and assessing in Software Project Management in a more real-life way. In this paper, we discuss the need of developing tools to teach in the scope of Software Project Management, and how we can achieve that learners test their knowledge and cover the needed educational objectives, in a ri...

Although there are some works related to the application of serious games for software project management training, there is a lack of tools that combine training and assessment in a single tool and that provide an environment for the learner where they can experiment decision making in real-life like scenarios. Project Decision (ProDec) is a simul...

Los estudios realizados han permitido observar la carencia de herramientas que permiten la formación y evaluación de los alumnos en la planificación y gestión de proyectos software. ProDec (Project Decision) es un “serious game” creado con la intención de formar y evaluar a los alumnos en dicho ámbito. Su principal objetivo es que los alumnos adqui...