Serious Games in Engineering: the Current State, Trends, and Future

Paper ID #32917 Serious Games in Engineering: The Current State, Trends, and Future Javeed Kittur, Arizona State University, Polytechnic campus Javeed Kittur is currently a doctoral student (Engineering Education Systems and Design) at Arizona State University, USA. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and a Master’s degree in Power Systems from India in 2011 and 2014 respectively. He has worked with Tata Consultancy Services as Assistant Systems Engineer from 2011-2012, India. He has worked as an Assistant Professor (2014 to 2018) in the department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, KLE Technological University, India. He is a certiﬁed IUCEE International Engineering Educator. He was awarded the ’Ing.Paed.IGIP’ title at ICTIEE, 2018. Mr. Tahzinul Islam, York University Tahzinul Islam obtained his B.Eng (Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering) from Universiti Putra Malaysia, a research-intensive public university in Malaysia. He completed his year-long Bachelors’ research project on his own topic of ’Virtual Reality App to teach Psychomotor Skills to Engineering Design students’. He went on to pursue his M.Eng (Innovation & Engineering Design) at the same university, with the dissertation title of ’Innovative Concept Design of a waterjet propelled Flood Rescue Boat’. Currently, Tahzinul is enrolled at York University in the MASc. of Mechanical Engineering program, studying Solar Still Desalination. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2021 Serious Games in Engineering – The Current State, Trends and Future Abstract Since its inception in the late 20th Century, computer graphics have improved exponentially and is improving even further in new avenues. While arcade games were early adopters of computer graphics, it was really in the 1990s, with the advent of the personal computer, that video games really started to gain traction. The video gaming industry started humbly with an online community of recreational developers. However, the internet bubble saw companies investing heavily in this new medium for games. Today, the video gaming industry is worth closer to $150 billion USD of yearly revenue, with well established practices, trends and new genres [1]. Furthermore, video games have delivered a wide variety of experiences, from interactive story telling, open world exploration, social games, puzzle games, virtual reality games, mobile games and so on. The present paper seeks to provide a direct comparison of trends in the video gaming industry, and how it could be translated to Serious Games in Engineering Education. To this aim, 28 relevant studies which have reported games for teaching engineering courses within the past decade were investigated. These studies were obtained after extensive Scopus search queries and filtered manually according to 8 research questions. Key questions we seek to investigate are what genre of games are being employed, disciplines most often targeted for gamification, assessment tools used to gather data on student learning within gamified settings, learning outcomes and attitudes towards game modules for students' engineering courses and as well as data analysis/collection methods. The results indicated that computer engineering and mechanical engineering disciplines were most used in serious games in engineering education. Unique concepts/topics were addressed is all the 28 articles reviewed. Questionnaire and pre- and post-tests were the most preferred data collected tools. 20 out of 28 articles used convenience sampling as the sampling method and most articles used sample sizes less than 100. Most articles used descriptive analyses methods in analyzing the data. Simulation was reported as the most used game genres and web-based application game platforms was commonly used in serious games in engineering education. Keywords: Engineering Education; Game-based learning; Serious Games; Video Games Introduction There are a lot of successful practices which have been adopted by the video gaming industry in recent years. These practices became apparent during the COVID19 pandemic, when many job sectors working remotely from home as well as students, stayed connected through social games, many of whom were not accustomed to online games [2]–[5]. To illustrate this, shortly after the pandemic started, MIT students took the initiative to build a virtual campus in Minecraft (a game now owned by Microsoft) [6], shown in Fig 1. This was done to facilitate interactions while students were not physically able to attend campus activities. Moreover, much of the real-world MIT campus was reconstructed purely from memory. Fig 1. Virtual campus of MIT built by students in Minecraft [6] In the realm of Serious Games, during the pandemic there were no real alternatives to facilitate such interactions. Some institutions used the Discord software, which has video and audio support in an intuitive interface, while most stuck to Zoom. Using Zoom for lessons presented its own set of problems. Most importantly, students did not feel comfortable turning on their cameras to reveal their in-home surroundings (even with the virtual background). A useful feature in Zoom is ‘Breakout’ rooms, which has obvious utility, however, switching between breakout rooms is not intuitive and similar to how breakout rooms are conducted in the real world. The feeling of brainstorming in breakout rooms while listening to other groups seems to provide motivation for each of the groups, while the instructor surveys and jumps between groups. In Zoom, however, instructors have widely noticed many groups staying quiet while the instructor is in the breakout room. One recent platform established in 2020 is Gather.town, which provides an alternative to Zoom in a videogame like 2D platform. The authors have briefly observed how much more students preferred a platform such as Gather.town to Zoom for events and classes. In contrast, there were no real educational alternatives to facilitate such interactions, illustrating the current lack of Serious Games which students could use for their learning as well as to have fun with educational content. Thus, the authors have structured the present paper to demonstrate the potential of Serious Games. While Serious Games have been reported in the literature, there have been a lack of Serious games adopting new hardware, software and novel game elements, to secure the interest of students to use such a platform for long term usage. Based on the findings from the literature, the authors strongly believe in developing a Multiplayer Serious Game experience in an Open-World format, utilizing an Oculus Quest 2 (a recent Virtual Reality headset released by Facebook), and developed using Unreal Engine 5. The Serious Game takes place on an Island and incorporates Role-Playing aspects (i.e. primarily an RPG game), to place students in scenarios where they must farm to survive. Even after the pandemic passes, there are a plethora of benefits that Serious Games pose, summarized below: Accessibility: the ease of sharing online links to enable anyone from around the world to play the Serious Game, regardless of their location, poses obvious benefits in terms of learning accessibility. Primer before labs: Students may gain valuable insight into what they have to learn in labs by viewing the content set in the real world. By having such a primer, in contrast to having read lab manuals beforehand, students are able to more easily relate to the lab content. Safety: Many experiments relevant to the curriculum are not accessible to students due to the unsafe nature of the experiment. Petroleum engineers and chemical engineers, especially, are affected by this. Cost of equipment: In many faculties globally, there is simply not enough funding to support the instruments optimal for student learning. Remote learning: Universities globally have realized the importance of enabling students from anywhere in the world to learn, despite physical distances. The Open University in the UK is a great example of this and has seen much success to date with over 100,000 students enrolled. The authors bring up these points to highlight that, unlike the video game industry, serious games (games targeted primarily for education rather than entertainment) have been far behind in terms of progress even until today. To illustrate this point, we may observe trends during the COVID19 pandemic, where educators had to resort to Zoom for classes and even engineering labs. Platforms such as Zoom are a largely 2D platform with very limited modes of interaction. Many students even felt comfortable turning on webcams, with educators having to awkwardly deliver lessons to a room full of black screens. The video gaming industry during COVID19, however, boomed greatly in terms of online users and revenue, especially with release of 9th generation video game consoles (the PS5 and Xbox Series XlS). Several researchers have previously used Serious Games and investigated its effectiveness in knowledge transfer [7]–[12], largely finding positive results and students responding positively. Developers of serious games still largely adhere to simple Simulation-based games, rendered with low-polygon 2D or 3D models, on a PC monitor with mouse and keyboard to deliver educational content. In order to lay the groundwork for a Serious Game set in an Open World, delivered by Virtual Reality, and developed in a high-fidelity game engine (Unreal Engine 5), the authors have conducted an extensive literature survey

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