Addressing Complex Real-World Challenges in Software Engineering Education through the Integration of Gamification and Crowdsourcing

Resumen

Software engineering education aims to train graduates for athorough under-standing of the principles, methods and tools needed toproduce high-quality software as well as to promote the development of their competences and skills required to develop software in a global world. In addition to rich technical skills, software engineers need to develop particularsoft skills such as the ability to clearly communicate within international projects characterised by cross-cultural communication and collaboration. Moreover, software engineering education needs to face critical challenges coming fromits theoretical nature and the difficulty to integrate authentic practice in the classroom. Frequently, these challenges lead to student’s disengagement. In this work, we describe the experience we conducted during the two COVID-19 pandemic years in a Software Project Management course, in which the risk of student’s disengagement was accentuated by the fact that the course is taughtentirely online. We adopted a student-as-a-producer learning approach together with the CLIL methodology for content and language integrated learning. To address the challenge of student’s engagement in the two entirely online editions of the course, motivational technologies such as gamification, serious games and crowdsourcing were used.