Motivation and learning progress through educational games

In engineering, we are often faced with the problem of how to teach complex theoretical material to students who are mainly interested in solving practical problems. This gap between the application-oriented expectation of the learner and the theory-focused material chosen by the lecturer may end up causing high barriers for the learning performance of the students. This becomes obvious if we recall that motivation is a cornerstone for good learning. One way to close this gap between theory and practice is educational games. In this paper, we show how educational games can exemplarily help to motivate and teach undergraduate university students in a basic automatic control course. The success of this approach can, for example, be seen from the course evaluations and feedback from our students.