Gaming And Interactive Visualization For Education - Year 1 Progress

In engineering disciplines, visualization can provide an essential mode to facilitate student understanding of important and abstract concepts. Learning through a medium that combines course materials with game characteristics can be a powerful tool for education. This approach is expected to improve student willingness to learn, which will in turn increase the interests of high school and undergraduate students towards engineering as a future career. In this paper, three teaching modules based on the Gaming and Interactive Visualization for Education (GIVE) in three universities will be described in detail with enhanced game characteristics. Also, using the newly developed assessment tools, the evaluation data from the students who have experienced the GIVE system will be analyzed. More specifically, the three modules are designed and illustrated in this paper for the Flight Mechanics, Introduction to Electrical Engineering, and Design and Manufacturing. The following game characteristics have been considered and implemented in the modules: progressively balanced goal, feedback, time sensitive scoring, adaptive scoring, meaningful visual presentation, emotional involvement, avoiding guess, constitutive rule, operational rule, background, challenges, and rewards. Along with the course module development and implementation, the outcomes have been assessed using our evaluation system. The results have been analyzed and suggestions have been given for future work. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010