Abstract:

Scope:
How can we motivate and engage students of technical careers on social science subjects? We believe this can be done through gamification techniques. In this research we present a gamification strategy, together with its impact on students final marks on the exam.

Introduction:
Engineering and technical degree tudents from all over the world face a great challenge: after being trained in hard skills, they find that soft skills are indispensable for a professional career. Soft skills are also trained in technical universities, although students consider them, in the best of cases, a complementary formation to hard skills.

Current educational models highlight the need to prepare students for their future professional career, as well as encourage the development of their skills and abilities, seeking a balance between technical ("hard") skills and social ("soft") skills. However, the development of skills related to the social sciences such as economics or business administration is often seen by students as a "distraction" that prevents them from focusing on the acquisition of technical skills, which they consider the "core" of their studies. We use the results of gamification during the course to assess to what extent the marks that a certain student received on the gamification process predict the results he/she obtains in the exam.

Methodology:
During seven weeks of teaching, students have been playing a Kahoot game after each teaching session. Their grades on the game have been recorded, with the aim of finding: (i) if there is a correlation between the grades obtained in the game and the ones of the exam, and (ii) if those students attending the lesson (and therefore participated in the game) obtain better marks in the exam than those who did not attend the lesson.
The analyses are performed through correlations and t-Student tests for averages differences.

Results and conclusion:
The results obtained point towards the importance of attending the lessons for achieving a good mark on the exam. At the same time, the participation on the game is valuable for the student in terms of the final mark obtained on the exam, with the particularities explained in the final paper.
We can therefore conclude that gamification techniques are appropriate for increasing motivation and engagement on the study of social science subjects on technical careers.

Keywords:

Gamification, innovation, economics, soft skills.