Reinforcing Software Engineering Learning through Provenance

Software engineering is focused on practical and theoretical aspects of the software production. Teaching software engineering is traditionally done through theoretical classes with some practical exercises. Recently, games and simulators were introduced as a ludic alternative for software engineering learning, where decisions and interactions become key factors to transmit and acquire knowledge. However, mistakes made by wrong decisions may jeopardize the learning process, especially when reproducing its effects is not a viable option due to the nondeterministic nature of games. With this in mind, in a previous work we proposed a novel approach based on provenance concepts in order to present the decisions and effects of such decisions when learning through games. In this work, we present an experimental evaluation of that approach with undergraduate students. The obtained results show that the use of provenance leads to faster and more accurate answers from students, including learning aspects that could not be achieved by a traditional educational game.