Enhancing a gamified tool for UML modeling education

2026-04-24

AI Summary

This work addresses the common underestimation among students of the pedagogical value of UML use case and class diagrams in software engineering education, noting that existing gamified tools support only class diagrams. Building upon UMLegend, the study presents a refactored implementation that, for the first time, incorporates use case diagrams into gamified UML instruction. The redesigned system employs a modular architecture to enable flexible extension to multiple modeling languages and integrates dynamic feedback mechanisms alongside design principles that reinforce long-term learning. This extension not only fills a critical gap in gamified training for use case diagrams but also establishes the foundation for a longitudinal study scheduled for 2026, which aims to empirically evaluate the impact of sustained gamified learning on students’ mastery of UML and their academic performance.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs

Abstract

Unified Modeling Language (UML) Use Case and Class Diagrams are fundamental modeling notations in Software Engineering (SE) education due to their importance for requirements and model-based engineering, yet their relevance is underestimated by students, who tend to dismiss the topic as secondary. Gamification has been adopted to make modeling education more appealing, but existing tools focus almost exclusively on class diagrams, leaving support for use cases and other notations unexplored. In 2025, we designed UMLegend, a gamified tool for class diagrams that offered dynamic feedback to help students learn correct modeling practices and multiple long-term mechanics to increase engagement, and performed a study with the tool. With this paper, we describe how we enhanced UMLegend following the results of the experiment so that it can support more modeling languages, with use case diagrams being added to the type of available exercises in the tool. The revised version has been refactored to have a modular architecture, to make it easier to add other software engineering topics and additional modeling notations. We also describe the potential impact we expect the new version to have, and outline a longitudinal study we intend to perform in 2026 where we will assess whether long-term UML gamification leads to improved student performance.

Problem

• UML modeling
• gamification
• use case diagrams
• class diagrams
• software engineering education

Innovation

• gamified learning
• UML modeling
• modular architecture
• use case diagrams
• educational tool