Usefulness of Digital Serious Games in Engineering for Diverse Undergraduate Students

Abstract

The use of educational digital games as supplemental tools to course instruction materials has increased over the last several decades and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Though these types of instructional games have been employed in the majority of STEM disciplines, less is known about how diverse populations of students interpret and define the value of these games towards achieving academic and professional pursuits. A mixed-method sequential exploratory research design method that was framed on the Technology Acceptance Model, Game-Based Learning Theory and Expectancy Value Theory was used to examine how 201 students perceived the usefulness of an intuitive education game that was designed to teach engineering mechanics used in designing civil structures. We found that students had different expectations of educational digital games than games designed for entertainment used outside of classroom environments. Several students thought that the ability to design their own structures and observe structure failure in real-time was a valuable asset in understanding how truss structures responded to physical loading conditions. However, few students thought the educational game would be useful for exam (14/26) or job interview (19/26) preparation. Students associated more value with engineering games that illustrate course content and mathematical calculations used in STEM courses than those that do not include these elements.

Digital Storytelling in Education: A Transmedia Integration Approach for the Non-Developers

“…Such technology-enhanced learning methods have become very popular and effective when it comes to disciplines involving digital technology [14][15][16][17]25] and contemporary media literacy needs [1,32], which demand multidisciplinary topics [2], cultural heritage projects stimulating audience entertainment and participation [6,8,16,24] and serious games triggering infotainment and experiential education to elementary school users and older groups [3,5,29,30]. Popular examples of game-based and blended learning approaches are frequent in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) [50][51][52], where art is also gaining popularity and acceptance, forming the STEAM education paradigm (as an extension to STEM) [53]. To the best of our knowledge, related efforts are limited in such an integrated manner for teaching classical topics, such as the "Odyssey" [4].…”

Serious Games in Higher Education in the Transforming Process to Education 4.0—Systematized Review

“…The work aims to provide feedback based on the emotional state. The other games in this area have the purpose of motivating or engaging students [32,33,41,43,45,48], or increasing the learning effect [29,30,33,35,[37][38][39][40][46][47][48].…”

A Game for Learning How to Model in Graph Theory

“…In [12], the authors present survey results showing that engineering students in particular see a great deal of potential in the use of educational games. In [13], the authors show how engineering students positively evalu-ated the usefulness of games that illustrate course content and mathematical calculations used in STEM courses. A flipped classroom model combined with games, provided in [14], has been shown to strengthen and improve the way Mathematics learning and teaching content, strategies, and approaches are enacted in different levels of education, including higher education.…”

“…(c) This section aims to check whether the students have assimilated the techniques, algorithms, and reasoning used in the previous sections. In this case, the matrices to be used to find the costs in points and kilometers coincide with the matrices C and K from section (a), except for the entries (10,13), (13,10), (1,16), and (16, 1), which are weighted with ∞.…”

“…(c) Elner manages to overcome the challenge with the maximum number of points possible, and in a later screen, he finds himself with the possibility of using the same map with the added restrictions that the routes(10,13) and(1,16) have become inaccessible. Is Elner able to make it from Rojcatar to Casue in these new circumstances?…”