Abstract:

Teaching is evolving towards new paradigms; innovative learning methods include the application of gamification techniques, usually achieving a high engagement in students of any educational level.

In this paper, a gamified experience based on techniques such as educational escape-rooms or breakouts EDUs in Higher Education is presented. The experience has been implemented in the third course subject of Ergonomics, which is taught in the Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering, at Universitat Jaume I (Castelló, Spain).

In this subject, there are three practical sessions of anthropometrical problems, where students apply the knowledge acquired in previous sessions of theory and problems solved by the teacher, to establish the dimensions that a product should have, from anthropometrical measurements of their potential users. Students attending these practical sessions were divided this course for the first time, so that the total number of students attended each session in two different days. This enabled the application, in one of these sessions, of a gamified experience.

First, a short video was shown, with the aim of awake students’ interest and motivation. Besides, an explanatory text of a mysterious case of theft was presented to the students, who should solve the case, discarding suspects until find the thief. To do this, the students had to deduce, from the dimensional characteristics of the suspects, who among them could be potential users of certain products, or if they would be comfortable or uncomfortable when using some objects. The experience was repeated two days later, for the other half of students, changing some details and the guilty of the theft.

After the experience, students answered a questionnaire, obtaining, among other results, that they consider this kind of sessions more entertaining than traditional ones, and that they favour learning and collaboration within the team work. Also the teacher underlined that students’ engagement and active participation during the session was much higher than usual. The paper describes more accurately details of the experience and their results, showing a successful case of application of gamification techniques in Engineering studies.

Keywords:

Gamification techniques, Breakouts EDUs, Educational escape-rooms, Industrial design engineering.