Engineering instructors often rely on the traditional lecture model where they lecture on a topic, with or without a slideshow, to a classroom of students. In this model, student engagement is low or non-existent with students neglecting to engage with the material until an assessment (i.e. an assignment or examination) is due. Further, students often do not get much practice with the soft-skills that are critical for successful professional interactions in industrial practice and future academic work in
these passive learning environments. However, there have been alternative approaches proposed to help address the engagement and skill gaps. We describe our experiences in revising two game design courses at the University of Michigan – Dearborn where we replaced a traditional, lecture-heavy, course delivery model with one involving active-learning, role-play, and gamification. We track a cohort of students through a two-course game design sequence and report our findings from daily and term assessments.
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