Serious games to improve student learning in engineering classes

Abstract

Experiential Learning has been proven to be effective in teaching engineering topics. Educational games, in particular, have the potential to address many systemic deficiencies for five reasons: massive reach, effective learning paradigms, enhanced brain chemistry, time on task and improved learning outcomes.1,2 Last fall, the American government awarded $10.5 billion to the development of serious games for training purposes that result in better decision making.3 About 8,000 papers were identified that reported the positive impacts of games on users over the past 14 years. Of these, about 130 papers reported empirical evidence about impacts on learning and engagement.4 A serious game can be defined as a world where the students play simulated events using characters that interact with them, and, in turn, make them learn a concept much more thoroughly than what is possible in a classroom or in a lab session. This paper describes a project where a university joined with a private company to teach the concept of design process by using a serious game. The paper provides details about the design and development of the serious game. The research model integrates organizational, engineering education and educational learning literature to research how game play interacts with learning styles, gender and race of the participants, thereby having the potential to act as facilitators to the learning process. The targeted student groups for this experiment will be freshmen engineering students at two universities. This paper describes a project where the concept of an engineering design process was taught using two engineering design learning modules, and evaluated using a control/experimental set up. In the control class, the students are exposed to a lecture about the engineering design process, an active learning exercise (Title: Statistics Applied to Data Analysis), and a pasta tower building activity. In the experimental set up, the students are exposed to a lecture about the engineering design process, a design simulation exercise (Serious game titled ' Engineering Heights: The Design Process in Action'), and a pasta tower building activity. External evaluators will use the same instruments and focus groups to collect both quantitative and qualitative assessment data for both sections. Analysis of the data from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective is expected to provide a set of findings. The results of this project can contribute to understanding whether serious games facilitate students' deep learning about the concept of design process. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.