Serious Games to Improve Student Learning in Engineering Classes

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 the design process by using a serious game and provides details about the design and development of the 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 were 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 were 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 were 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 used the same instruments and focus groups to collect both quantitative and qualitative assessment data for both sections. All the students in the experimental group who worked with the game achieved better learning outcomes, had higher performance scores in the pasta tower design challenge, and higher perceived concentration levels. In focus group sessions, students commented that the serious game helped them understand the effects of different shapes and structures when presented with the practical challenge of designing and building pasta towers.