Application generators simplify software development and make it possible to develop a single application for different platforms by using the same project. User Interface Design Patterns (UIDPs) facilitate interaction between the application and the user and provide the opportunity to build high-quality software. Furthermore, many studies have reported an increase in the use of both mobile devices and educational applications for such devices. This paper presents Atila, a UIDPs-based educational application generator. Applications developed are compatible with four operating systems: Android™, Fire-fox® OS, macOS™, Windows Phone®, and the Web. The main advantage of Atila is its ability to rapidly generate applications through an appropriate interaction with the user.

Education is key to a just and progressive society. It is specially provided by schools and reflects on various areas of our lives. The importance of education has led to new schemes in the development of educational applications. The goal of this research is to propose the design of an architecture for educational application development that relies on a set of user interface design patterns (UIDPs) to facilitate the laborious, time-consuming task of application development. To this end, this article presents the EduGene as the proof of concept. Applications generated with EduGene are compatible with four operating systems, Android™, Firefox® OS, macOS®, and Windows Phone®, and with the Web. Furthermore, EduGene is compatible with three types of devices: mobile (smartphones and tablets), desktop, and television. The evaluation results prove that EduGene is a user-friendly educational application generator, since it provides an intuitive interface that facilitates user interaction. The e-learning tools selected to perform EduGene’s comparative evaluation are Moodle, Sakai, and ATutor. It is important to mention that the goal of the evaluation was only to highlight the benefits of EduGene as an educational app development tool.

This paper reviews the literature on automatic code generation of user-centered serious games. We decided to break the study in two parts: one study about serious games with model driven engineering, and another study about user-centered serious games. This paper presents an extension of a paper presented at CONISOFT 20 where a systematic review of 5 years old at the time of writing was presented exclusively. The systematic literature review conducted in this paper covers a decade of information from January 2012 to June 2022. The main objective is to know the literature that helps to mitigate the costs and time of software development in serious games. The overall conclusion is that there is still work to be done to combine serious user-centered games and automatic generation. This paper is a systematic review that identifies relevant publications and provides an overview of research areas and publication venues. In addition, Research perspectives were classified according to common objectives, techniques, and approaches. Finally, is presented point out challenges and opportunities for future research and development.

An analysis of tools for automatic software development and automatic code generation