Abstract:

The central idea of an open-ended lab methodology is allowing students to choose their own experiment without having to follow a closed set of instructions. In practice, the degree of openness is limited by the topic and the available resources. However, the freedom or lack of guidelines entails a high degree of mastery of the skills needed to carry out a lab-session and students need a specific training in those skills or concepts to satisfactorily handle the experiment.

Scientific lab-sessions are conducted inside the framework of the scientific method, which provides an ordered procedure to be followed and therefore lightens the large number of new details that first-year university students have to manage in order to tackle the open-ended experiment. As instructors of these students, it is a significant challenge for us to design a set of activities that help students acquire the competences needed in a motivating way.

Game-based learning fits well with the active nature of the lab-sessions and helps students engage in the initial effort that they have to do in order to assimilate the subtleties of the many different concepts that the lab framework carries. For this reason, we have devised a game-flavored context to the work in the laboratory, which will be explained in detail here. We also present the results of the feedback given by students regarding the new dynamics of the lab – sessions.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Gamification, Open-ended laboratory, Engineering.