Programming has become a very important aspect of Software Engineering, integral to curricula across disciplines, from Computer Science to Scientific and Economics fields. Recently, employers have started prioritising candidates who possess not only hard skills but also essential soft skills for programming jobs. While certifications and degrees can demonstrate technical proficiency, they do not adequately reflect soft skills, which are often acquired through life experiences. Educational institutions typically do not focus on teaching soft skills, leaving individuals to develop them independently. This paper introduces a novel intelligent educational adventure game designed to help students develop both technical skills (such as learning HTML) and essential soft skills for developers. These soft skills include communication, teamwork, interpersonal skills, and customer relations, which are integrated into the game through various tasks and interactions with non-playable characters (NPCs). The game adapts its scenario to the soft skills needed by individual students by selecting appropriate tasks. For evaluation, we identified ten important soft skills for software engineers based on existing literature and employed the cognitive walkthrough method with human experts to assess which skills the game effectively develops. The results indicate that many critical soft skills are practised through the diverse tasks presented in the intelligent educational game.

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Enhancing Soft Skills Alongside Hard Skills for Programming and Software Engineering Through an Intelligent Educational Adventure Game

  • Spyros Papadimitriou,
  • Maria Virvou

摘要

Programming has become a very important aspect of Software Engineering, integral to curricula across disciplines, from Computer Science to Scientific and Economics fields. Recently, employers have started prioritising candidates who possess not only hard skills but also essential soft skills for programming jobs. While certifications and degrees can demonstrate technical proficiency, they do not adequately reflect soft skills, which are often acquired through life experiences. Educational institutions typically do not focus on teaching soft skills, leaving individuals to develop them independently. This paper introduces a novel intelligent educational adventure game designed to help students develop both technical skills (such as learning HTML) and essential soft skills for developers. These soft skills include communication, teamwork, interpersonal skills, and customer relations, which are integrated into the game through various tasks and interactions with non-playable characters (NPCs). The game adapts its scenario to the soft skills needed by individual students by selecting appropriate tasks. For evaluation, we identified ten important soft skills for software engineers based on existing literature and employed the cognitive walkthrough method with human experts to assess which skills the game effectively develops. The results indicate that many critical soft skills are practised through the diverse tasks presented in the intelligent educational game.