Serious Game to Learn Software Testing

Abstract

Throughout history games have always assumed an essentially playful component; This fact is in itself positive. However, with the emergence of video games, associated with a great offer and ease of access to them, negative aspects also began appearing. This is particularly true for children and young people such as students, who often deviate from what should be their main focus. To that extent, and given the young people's adherence to this type of entertainment and the new technologies in general associated with it, it may be possible to promote a new method of quality teaching / learning, but more appealing and motivating than traditional methods. The combination of the ludic and learning strand is dubbed a "serious game". Therefore, because it is a new and promising area of research, in the interface between computer science and teaching, the general objective of this work is to create a generic serious game in a computer platform available on the web. The specific objectives are to allow this platform to be adaptable to the teaching / learning interest of each user: (a) choosing the type of game from the available typologies; (B) adapting it to the type of teaching / learning intended. For this, a computer platform was developed, based on a work previously developed by Ribeiro, TPB; Paiva, ACR (2015) and Paiva, ACR; Flores, NH; Barbosa, AG; Ribeiro, TPB (2016) for Software Testing. It was used HTML5, CSS3 and a Javascript library, namely AngularJS. This serious game is called ILearnTest, and implements three types of exercises: (a) multiple choice; (B) complete a space with one word; (C) select concept(s) associated with a topic. From here, this software can be loaded with the contents that the user wants. In this first phase, this user will have to have the expertise to do so, wishing that in the near future the application may be able to assist any user in creating their own file.