EDUCATIONAL GAME CONCEPT FOR THE KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN HIGHER EDUCATION WITHIN THE FIELD OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

The use of new media like educational games for knowledge transfer purposes is emphasized within the last decades to support the knowledge construction process. Within higher education especially in the field of product development (mechanical engineering) those approaches are not common, due to the effort for their implementation and the uncertainty of a successful knowledge transfer. However, established concepts in other fields like Operations Management demonstrate that educational games can be beneficial for the education of the new scientific generation. As a result, this paper investigates how knowledge in context of product development and linked business processes (e.g. Marketing, Production, Controlling …) can be transferred through educational games and which specific benefits can be grasped by this procedure?
With a literature review on established procedural models in the field of product development, this paper derives the Munich procedural model (‘Münchner Vorgehensmodell’) as a basis for the presented educational game. Passing through the development process of a fictitious company, the actor accomplishes tasks, gaining a profound understanding of the development processes and underlying methods (e.g. functional modeling, morphological box …). Due to the interdisciplinary character of the developing technical products, the presented educational game emphases Marketing, Controlling and Sales beside the central perspective of the Development.
With this setting, the game enables a joined ‘play’ of five actors in a social environment, which strengthen the extrinsic motivation of the actors through a certain level of competition. Besides extrinsic motivation this paper considers intrinsic motivation through the design of the educational game, which features entertainment and educational value at the same time. In order to support the flow of the game and the accessibility of the contents to inexperienced actors, the presented educational game provides a high level of usability. Integrated examples and repetitions of tasks support the knowledge construction process, which is even intensified through the interaction in a group of actors. Finally, the educational game concept is validated through a survey among a group of students.