Creating a Gamified Tutorial for Socio-Technical Security Requirements Engineering Education

Abstract

Thanks to the advent of interactive technologies, education institutions are looking for innovative teaching methods to increase the engagement and reach of students. Besides the uprise of MOOCs, gamification has been shown to produce positive results when it comes to increasing people’s engagement and interest in conducting tasks. Unfortunately, the application and benefits of these technologies in teaching software engineering (SE) and requirements engineering (RE) -the latter being our area of focus- remain largely unexplored. In this thesis, we introduce the STS-Tooltorial, an interactive gamified platform that executes within a security requirements modeling tool and helps learners apprehend the STS-ml language and basic notions about security requirements. In addition, we present the framework and design principles that underpinned the design of our gamified interactive tutorial, including best practices for gamifying learning experiences and instructional design considerations. Finally, we report a two-country (Spain, Netherlands), two-population (postgraduate students, IT professionals) early evaluation focused on the platform’s effectiveness and usability.