Abstract:

There are a lot of different approaches in STEM education but it often happens that students feel detached in front of their computers, following tasks and assignments in stepwise procedures predefined by the instructor, syllabi, or professional literature. Findings of the survey we conducted at our institute reveal that many students believe that digital platform literacy should become a priority in modern curricula, so while providing an insight into the digital skillset that is needed, we try to shape the learning process more interestingly by gamification of the learning process and work on real industry-based projects that can help students understand, adopt and pursue digital transformation when continuing with their businesses. This learning experience in engineering education based on gamification is lately, not only due to the COVID-19 crisis, shifted from traditional in-class teacher-centered to hybrid learner-centered educational processes based on real-life problems which encourage problem- and project-based learning. To meet these experiences, it is very common to include a senior capstone course in undergraduate STEM degrees.

In this paper, we will demonstrate two examples of gamification in the learning process in senior capstone courses. In both approaches, students work in teams, develop a real industry-based project that includes documentation development, and project plans, and base their reasoning and decision-making on the inputs from the project sponsors. In both approaches, they develop an application that is vaguely defined, so they need to engineer the solution. While in the process of achieving the outcomes, they experience several realistic “curve balls” during the year-long project.

This year one project was orientred on the creation of an Internet marketing simulation where both IT and Business students developed the application where Business students defined market inputs and shaped the market principles while IT students developed the technical counterpart as a distributed application based on the blockchain technology to ensure integrity and immutability of the simulation process and outcomes. The other project was oriented on developing a voice controller for an In-vehicle entertainment system where IT students needed to define an interface to communicate with the basic multimedia and other car features based on the voice of the driver or passengers. Additionally, in this paper, we will discuss different approaches for designing the gamification process and experience details in the learning process that we have gained so far.

Keywords:

STEM learning, gamification, industry project, capstone project.