Experiences of using a game for improving learning in software requirements elicitation I van Garcia 1 Carla Pacheco 1 Andrés León 1 Jose A. Calvo-Manzano 2 1 Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, División de Estudios de Posgrado, Oaxaca, Mexico 2 Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos, Madrid, Spain Correspondence Ivan García, Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, División de Estudios de Posgrado, Oaxaca, Mexico. Email: ivan@mixteco.utm.mx 1 1 INTRODUCTION Many recent studies have demonstrated that the traditional methods used in teaching software requirements elicitation are ineffective because they fequently produce unskilled graduates who are inappropriately tained to apply their practica! knowledge in the workplace. Therefore, the combination of taditional teaching approaches and modern learning tools has been used to better prepare undergraduate students. Biyubi is a game that has been developed to complement traditional teaching in order to facilitate the learning of requirements elicitation activities on an undergraduate Software Engineering course. Biyubi provides a simulated environment for students so that they can explore, analyze, and discover the wishes and needs of the correct stakeholders. This game has been tested and validated by undergraduate students fom the NovaUniversitas University, Mexico. The use of Biyubi achieved an increase in the motivation, satisfaction, and learning experience of students in requirements elicitation. The game has the potential to better explain the proper use of a requirements elicitation technique while the technical skills of the students are also improved. Effective education for students studying software require ments elicitation can be reinforced with the achievement of ludie activities. Students must learn, fr example, how to observe and identify the correct stakeholders, communicate with them by applying the proper elicitation technique (or a combination of techniques), analyze, and classify the elicited information, as well as correctly identify the wishes and needs of the various stakeholders to acquire the skills required to perform the role of a professional analyst. students. This is not the most suitable approach, however, for higher-cognitive objectives aimed at the application and tansfer of knowledge to real-life situations, nor for encouraging a more active learning process [16]. This is a major problem for students because modern engineering disciplines, such as Software Engineering, require a highly practica! environment that enables them to learn how to work on projects that are continually subject to any number of variables, such as clients, society, technology, government, and customers' rapidly changing requirements. The lack of a practica! component reduces the opportunity for students to put into practice abstract elements and software requirements elicitation techniques. Despite research arguing against its ineffectiveness, "chalk and talk" is the main pedagogical technique used in engineering education [8]. lt is true that theoretical lessons, which actively incorporate the "chalk and talk" concept in university classrooms, are suitable for presenting highly abstract concepts and factual information to undergraduate The adoption of Game Based Learning (GBL) as an alternative learing method in Software Engineering courses is becoming increasingly popular [2,43,25]. GBL can be defned as the application of the principles of traditional