A new approach to Gamification in engineering education: the Learner-Designer Approach to Serious Games

Gamification is usually defined as the use of game structure components in circumstances that are not commonly associated with games. In engineering studies, Gamification and its sub-concept of Serious Games are rather widespread pedagogical models. Just like in other application scopes, the approach to their utilisation or analysis is always concerned with the players, their psychological experience and the relevance of their learning outcomes. The aim of this work is to illustrate the results of a different approach, the ‘Learner-Designer Approach to Serious Games’ (LDASG). The study was carried out through a single group variation on the two-group posttest-only randomised experiment and performed on 79 second year undergraduate students of an Industrial Plant Design course within a Management Engineering programme. Quantitative data on the students’ learning performance and learning experience were collected through a test and a questionnaire, respectively. The test results were analyzed by means of the Paired Samples Test and effect sizes were calculated. As to the questionnaire, a descriptive analysis was employed. The outcomes obtained show how LDASG can successfully compete with other active learning methodologies.