A Systematic Survey of Games Used for Software Engineering Education

Simsoft is a serious game -- one that trains or educates -- at the centre of a research project designed to see if and how games can contribute to better software engineering management education by helping software engineers and project managers explore some of the dynamic complexities of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. A necessary precursor for this project was to establish what games already existed in the field and how effective they had been. To this end a systematic review of the literature was conducted using a collection of online science, engineering, education, and business databases looking for games or simulations used for educational or training purposes in software engineering or software project management across any of the SWEBOK knowledge areas. The results showed that games were mainly used in the SWEBOK knowledge areas of software engineering management and development processes, and most game activity was in Europe and the Americas.