Comparing a LEGO® Serious Play Activity With a Traditional Lecture in Software Engineering Education

Active learning methods are needed to promote student motivation and facilitate the development of technical and soft skills. Previous research in software engineering education shows that LEGO (R) Serious Play (LSP) fully aligns with these needs. However, prior works are usually based on insufficiently robust research methods that do not include a large sample, a variety of evaluation instruments, and/or rigorous comparative methods such as randomized controlled trials, which makes it difficult to obtain reliable and solid conclusions. This article presents an original LSP activity to teach software development life cycle models and core software engineering activities, tackling learning objectives different from those addressed by the LSP activities reported in prior works. The LSP activity was validated through a cluster-randomized controlled trial involving 217 computer science students. These students were divided into a control group that received a traditional lecture and an experimental group that performed the LSP activity. The research was supported by pre and post-tests that allowed the study of the knowledge attained by the students, as well as a questionnaire to gather students' perceptions. The results indicate that the students in the experimental group learned significantly more and were more motivated than their counterparts in the control group. This leads to the conclusion that LSP-based activities such as the one reported in this article are highly effective in terms of knowledge acquisition and motivation to teach some software engineering topics compared to traditional lectures.