Collaborative Research: Developing a Framework to better engage students in STEM via Game Design

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Arizona State University and the University of Pittsburgh will implement a project entitled "Developing a Framework to better engage students in STEM via Game Design," focused on active learning through game design approaches for civil engineering and construction courses. The framework will be not only modular and scalable, fitting into a variety of content areas, but will also serve as a method of assessing student learning with minimal barriers to classroom use. It will offer STEM instructors a relatively easy way to implement active learning in the classroom, and rather than teaching through game play, the project will require students to apply course content to the design of their own games, in turn illustrating their mastery of course content. To do this, the investigators will employ three approaches for game design implementation, and compare these approaches within and across courses. The approaches include: (1) asking students to re-purpose classic board games to reflect course content, (2) modifying existing educational games to better reflect course content, and (3) creating a new game with student-developed learning objectives. Topics will include, but are not limited to, excavations and foundations, structural systems, industrial ecology, energy use, emissions, resource scarcity, and implications of environmental policies and factors related to resource consumption. All of these topics have significant implications for public safety, health and welfare. Additional broader impacts will be achieved through promoting the game design framework and its effects on student learning and retention, publishing and marketing student-created games as education resources that are easily adoptable by faculty at various institutions, and by sharing the games in K-12 outreach efforts, thereby promoting interest in civil engineering and construction.Games and game-based learning have been used in many classrooms as an active learning strategy. They are well-documented methods to engage and motivate students through course material in order to improve student learning outcomes. The investigators have found that following game play with game design easily moves students up the cognitive dimensions of Bloom's taxonomy, from merely understanding to reflection, creation, and evaluation. They will aim to discover if implementation of this framework promotes increased student engagement, sense of community, metacognition, and retention in STEM. The research questions to be studied are: (1) As a curricular tool, does game design support student engagement, strengthen a sense of community, improve metacognition, and increase intention to remain in engineering? (2) What are the principles and characteristics of this approach that make it successful for a given student level or program? (3) What are effective practices for widespread transferability and scalability? Using the outcomes of formative assessments such as observations, surveys, evaluations of student work, etc., investigators will continuously refine the three approaches that make up their framework to document and disseminate successful practices, providing transformative curricular materials to other instructors in civil engineering and construction.