To Game or Not to Game?

One challenge in software engineering education is to give students sufficient hands-on experience in actually building software. This is necessary so that students can understand which practices and techniques are useful in various situations. Some researchers have advocated alternative teaching methods to help in this regard. If successful, such methods could give students some experience with different approaches´ effects in a shorter, more constrained time period. We examine one such approach, game-based learning, here.