The use of serious games in the education of engineers

Abstract

Serious games have been used in the education of engineering students and professionals for decades, but still they have not reached their maximum diffusion. Learning by gaming is often seen as not serious enough within higher education and vocational training. Consequently, gaming as a teaching method is still often excluded from many curricula. Hence, students lack the experience of active knowledge acquisition during lessons and encounter a barrier for successful participation in serious games later. Although a variety of games have been developed and proved successful for the mediation of skills in complex systems (Windhoff, 2001), this paper discusses why we think that serious games should be considered as a suitable learning method for the mediation of skills needed in the education of engineers and secondly to give some examples of current games and experience of their use. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.