Game-Based Mechanical Engineering Teaching and Learning - A Review

The usual approach to engineering education, though appropriate for some students, in general lacks adaptability for different learning needs. Game-based learning is an attempt to provide adaptable learner-centered education. This paper presents a review of the published works on game-based applications for Mechanical Engineering teaching and learning from the past five decades. A comprehensive review was performed, and more than 200 papers were screened, evaluating the gamification approach, educational objectives, and Mechanical Engineering curriculum. Bloom's taxonomy was used to identify cognitive learning outcomes for each of the games studied. There was also an attempt to establish Mechanical Engineering topics for an efficient curriculum and a correspondence of each game analyzed with the specific topic. The references found are presented according to Mechanical Engineering knowledge topic and cognitive learning outcome. Suggestions for further research on the field are made. The main ones include the need to formalize the educational objectives and development goals of the games, since most of the games studied did no such formalization, aswell as the development and design strategies adopted to achieve such goals, a recently growing field of study.