Learning innovation and design process is a necessity of the coming decade and games are a potential tool to do so. This paper proposes an extended taxonomy for categorising innovation and design games. The intent is to understand the essential, the similar and the different categories not only for development, but also for evaluation of innovation and design games, and in turn, help educators identify appropriate games for their learning objectives and curricula.

The Bologna declaration states that, "successful learning and studying in higher education should involve students in deep learning". However, a survey of faculty across institutes in Nepal and Bhutan highlights that the undergraduate students in engineering and management lack skills needed to be industry-ready. They face difficulty in getting employed after graduation and if placed, then struggle during their employment due to insufficient practical experience, lack of good communication skills and unawareness of larger socio-economic contexts. The Erasmus+ funded project, "Strengthening Problem-based learning in South Asian Universities"(PBL South Asia) is an endeavour to address these pressing concerns in education quality, employability and overall sustainable development of the region and to imbibe deep learning capabilities. Therefore, as an empirical study to clarify and in turn, inculcate PBL in South Asian undergraduate education, the young faculty of the inexperienced institutes from Nepal and Bhutan, alongside the students from the experienced institutes from India and Europe, were mentored by faculty and researchers from the latter to undertake multidisciplinary case studies. The strategy of 'Design Thinking' was employed to methodologically guide the cases and keep it consistently problem-based, i.e., the learning is driven by the problem with no one correct solution. Results showed that the participants reflected improvement in problem-solving skills and increased motivation, apart from enhanced collaboration and improved communication ability. Based on these findings, further development of curricula to imbibe PBL in its existing courses and guidelines to train the trainers for implementation of the same, is currently in progress.

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Design thinking (DT) can be a valuable tool for nurturing problem-solving abilities in school children. The objective of the paper is two-fold. The first is to evaluate the effectiveness of the DT process as a potential tool for open-ended problem-solving for school children; the second is to test the effectiveness of gamification of the DT process in terms of the extent of comprehension and learning of the process enabled by gamification. The paper presents a framework for IISC, a Design Thinking Process developed by the authors, and compares two gamified models of the DT process against one another using empirical studies that involved school children in the age-range of 14 to 18 (8th to 12th years of their twelve years of school education) playing the games. Feedback from the students and their mentors during the game was used as data for evaluation. The paper also discusses the limitations identified and suggested improvements of the two gamified models, and implications of these for designing more effective games.

The goal of this paper is to develop and test a gamified design thinking framework, including its pedagogical elements, for supporting various learning objectives for school students. By synthesizing the elements and principles of design, learning and games, the authors propose a framework for a learning tool for school students to fulfil a number of learning objectives; the framework includes a design thinking process called “IISC Design Thinking” and its gamified version called “IISC DBox”. The effectiveness of the framework as a learning tool has been evaluated by conducting workshops that involved 77 school students. The results suggest that the gamification used had a positive effect on the design outcomes, fulfilment of learning objectives, and learners' achievements, indicating the potential of the framework for offering an effective, gamified tool for promoting design thinking in school education. In addition to presenting results from empirical studies for fulfilment of the objectives, this paper also proposes an approach that can be used for identifying appropriate learning objectives, selecting appropriate game elements to fulfil these objectives, and integrating appropriate game elements with design and learning elements. The paper also proposes a general approach for assessing the effectiveness of a gamified version for attaining a given set of learning objectives. The methodology used in this paper thus can be used as a reference for developing and evaluating a gamified version of design thinking course suitable not only for school education but also for other domains (e.g., engineering, management) with minimal changes.