Gamification in a Graphical Engineering course - Learning by playing

Even though engineering is a vocational degree, students need to be stimulated so that they are more participative and active. New pedagogical methodologies have been proposed to inspire and motivate students while training to become professionals in the engineering field. One of them, gamification, is based on the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, like learning environments. Several studies have dealt with the use of gamification in engineering courses, 87% of them reporting that their implementation had some degree of positive outcome. This paper shows the experience of game-based learning applied to a Graphical Engineering course in the second year of the Mechanical Engineering curriculum at a Spanish university. Several activities were developed during the academic course, in which students had to face different kind of tasks: competitions, simulations, research tournaments, pokes, social forums, survey games, etc. As participation was voluntary in most cases, the current study is focused on the individual perception of the students, rather than on the overall learning outcomes of the group. The results of this experience based on "Learning by playing" have been positive, according to lecturers and students' perception. The number of students considering the game-based activates as beneficial or entertaining is between 3 to 10 times higher than those who think the opposite. The main advantages of gamification have been, thus, increasing the attending ratio of the class, enhancing the interest for the topics of the lectures, bringing fun and joy to the classroom and giving more initiative to the students.