Abstract:

Playing is one of the most intense learning experiences since our first years of life, becoming one of the main strategies by which we integrate different types of concepts in our personal development. Playing can be effective as a learning strategy when is accompanied by a structure and content that allows to put this practice in educational context, thus being a way to promote different types of learning such as meaningful learning, cooperative and collaborative learning, discovery learning and experiential learning. In the university environment, the students becoming an active part of the process and feeling motivated and committed to their learning is other advantage provides for this experience in the training of engineers (Torres, 2002).

The main objective of this experience was to design a board game applied to any subject belonging to the courses of Industrial Engineering in the Bio-Bio University, with the purpose of understand the new product design process. The students organized in team had to choose the topic to be addressed, doing a previous work of information gathering through the surveys and interviews application to other students as well as to the academics of the courses. Among the chosen courses were Algebra, English, Calculus. The different groups have to made their proposals, designing all the games constituent elements, that is, the rules of the game, the board and all the pieces, which should also be designed to be made in a 3D printer, as part of the requirements of the course.

It was chosen to work with game theme since many recent studies show that the ludic facilitate the learning processes of students, and playing games allows to develop other competencies, so-called soft competences such as: good organization, teamwork, critical thinking, sociability and creativity, among others. This experience was developed in the Entrepreneurship Workshop course, of the first year of the of Industrial Engineering degree, so it is an introductory subject course dictated every semester. Furthermore, other fundamental purposes sought with this work was the student experience that they can innovate and create from something they well known as a game, also they having to analyze different successful entrepreneur’s cases who developed this business and formed profitable companies from the creation of a board game.

This pedagogical practice had as a methodological foundation the games based learning and the "design thinking" methodology. The first, game-based learning refers to the cognitive area used in training in which the theoretical contents are presented by means of a game, and the second, is presented as a methodology for developing people-centered innovation, offering a perspective through which you can observe challenges, detect needs and finally, fix them. In other words, "design thinking" is an approach used to solve problems in order to meet the needs of people in a way that is technologically feasible and commercially viable (innovation Factory Institute, 2013).

Keywords:

Engineering, Design Thinking, Board game, Entrepreneurship.