Informatics in Education

The rapid development of technology in today’s times make business’ survival a rather complex task. It is therefore necessary for the specialized organization and administration of each company to differentiate and strengthen its competitive advantages. Gamification is an established practice in many business domains and can enforce employees to engage in business processes and change aspects of their behavior. Even though numerous gamification patterns that are described in literature have been used so far by businesses to various working environments, the outcomes were not the best possible that we would expect in terms of their right utilization to business non-game contexts. Thus, there is need for concise gamification patterns that can offer right guidance to game designers in business. Gamification design patterns can provide a distilled knowledge of techniques of how to design object-oriented software. This paper aims to address this gap in existing literature by describing new gamification design patterns, classifying them according to specific criteria and providing new information to this research domain. Our study is a descriptive literature review and is based on review of previous works. This descriptive literature review tries to give a better understanding by proposing new gamification design patterns in the continuously evolving research domain of gamification design patterns.

This article presents an approach to using open-source tools and open-source projects to add realistic and practical examples to a course on software design in a professional master's program of software engineering. Students are encouraged to use object-oriented, open-source software projects available on the Internet, and to analyze their design attributes using open-source tools, to hopefully improve their designs using documented design patterns and other design strategies. The proposed approach provides a variety of realistic examples for study, which can vary from semester to semester, without the instructor having to prepare complicated realistic examples or to rely on over-simplified examples in textbooks. Because the course and the approach are relatively new, a quantifiable assessment of the pedagogical approach has not been presented. However, the argument is made that realistic examples provide for better learning, and evidence is provided to show the feasibility of the approach. The instructor's role is more of a mentor than a traditional teacher, as every open-source project is different from a design perspective.