Abstract:

The use of serious games in educational contexts has gained attention in recent years, mainly due to a positive influence on student engagement and motivation. However, aspects related with the behavioural, emotional, and cognitive dimensions of learning can also be fostered by introducing game elements in engineering classrooms. For instance, improvements in teamwork, participation, critical thinking skills, among others, have been reported in the literature. Nevertheless, educational games must be carefully designed to achieve the expected results. Elements such as clear and meaningful goals, immediate and useful feedback, social play, adaptive content and complexity, and allowing some degree of choice during the game are examples of good design principles to consider.

In this work, a new board game (called ChemEngGame) is presented to be used during the final course of the Bachelor´s degree and in the first course of the Master´s degree in Chemical Engineering, both offered at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). The game consists of a board with coloured squares, one dice, several tokens (one per team) and five types of cards. Each colour in the squares is related to a different chemical engineering topic (blue: chemical reactors, red: unit operations, green: fluid mechanics, yellow: heat transfer, purple: fundamentals (thermodynamics, kinetics, etc.)), with different kind of cards (quizzes to be solved) in each deck. The first kind of cards are the “question” cards, where students have to answer a question. On the “panel” card, the students have to complete a panel consisting of a phrase or concept where only a few letters are shown. The “draw” card is a Pictionary-like challenge, where players must draw a concept related to the topic to be guessed by the teammates. Finally, in the “password” card the student have to define a term or concept without using a set of forbidden words. Moreover, there is also a sixth deck of cards (“luck”) that the team uncover where the “luck” symbol is shown in the dice. These special cards can show positive messages, such as avoiding “death” or advancing two squares, but there are also negative effects (e.g., skipping turns, moving back to the start square, etc.).

ChemEngGame has been designed to fulfil three objectives. In the subject Process and Product Design (fourth course of the Bachelor’s degree), the game will serve as an activity to go over the essential concepts from previous courses that students will be required to know during the subject. On the other hand, in the Master’s degree, 70-80% of the students enrolled come from different universities, so they do not collaborate as much as expected during the first weeks of the semester. Related to that, ChemEngGame will foster social interaction of the group, similarly to team-building sessions, allowing for the identification of both team leaders and students with less interacting behaviour. In connection with this, the game will also serve as a stealth assessment tool, where the progress of the students during the game will allow to discover strengths and weaknesses to be worked on in the different subjects.

Keywords:

Serious games, chemical engineering.