Use of Serious Games to Teach Engineering Design Fundamentals

There is a strong need to infuse engineering content and design principles for student learning into diverse K-12 technology education(Gattie etal., 2007; Hailey et al., 2005).Over the past decade, almost $3 billion has been invested in educational technology. In 2012, more than $1 billion was raised for educational technology to improve student motivation and learning processes (Nordin, 2013). With the investment in technology and the need for new instructional techniques to improve student learning, we investigate new innovative instructional materials like serious games and check their effectiveness at the K-12 level to infuse interest in the students to pursue STEM majors. Engineering design is hard to learn and harder to teach.Engineering design skills cannot be adequately taught in lectures alone; a more active learning experience is required (Albers et al., 2009).Serious games can be used for education at all levels, from preschool and elementary school, through middle school and high school, into colleges and universities, and even into the job market.

In this paper, we talk about the design, development and implementation of an engineering design serious game developed by Toolwire,a company with expertise in educational technologies in partnership with the Laboratory for Innovative Technology and Engineering Education (LITEE), a university center with extensive expertise in educational pedagogy and theories. The objective was to provide an active learning experience linking the engineering design process to a real-world simulation.A mixed methods approach (Creswell, 2013) was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the serious game. Analysis of the results showed that the students enjoyedworkingwith the serious game and this experience helped them in understanding the design process in a more effective manner.