Gamifying Business Process Modeling Education: A Longitudinal Study

Gamification, the practice consisting of adapting game elements and features in non-recreational contexts to increase user motivation and interest, has become increasingly common in recent years in the different fields of Software Engineering such as development, requirements definition, testing, and education. Among the different educational fields to which gamification has been applied, process modeling is currently not much explored: there are few examples of game-like approaches used for teaching process modeling, and such examples have yet to be applied for the duration of an entire course to assess possible benefits. We thus describe the use of BIPMIN, a platform that implements elements regularly used in gamified tools such as levels, avatars, and leaderboards, in an Information Systems course, where students used the tool to perform practical BPMN modeling exercises over the whole duration of the course to get feedback on their modeling strategies. The students’ opinions have been gathered in the form of an end-of-course questionnaire and have been analyzed following the Straussian grounded theory approach to assess the general sentiment regarding usability, appreciation, and possible issues and improvement areas of the tool. The gathered results are encouraging, as they show that the tool has been well received and that its features that help student understanding the reasons behind their errors have been perceived as helpful for learning and improving BPMN modeling.