Influence of Game-Based Methods in Developing Engineering Competences

Introduction

One of the main goals of undergraduate institutions is to improve the quality and efficiency of education and to improve the professionals who will graduate. So moreover than developing just technical and theoretical knowledge required of graduating professionals, it is necessary the activation of cognitive and learning competences (Liuta et al., 2019) - according to (De Jesus & Costa, 2013), it is also a need in forming engineers. In the other hand, according to (Hamari et al., 2016), it can also be noted that student disinterest is an international problem because, once 20-25% of them classified themselves as having low participation and a low sense of belonging, as discovered in a research in 28 countries members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Taking in mind that more than 2.5 billion people in the world spent time playing video games (SuperData Research, 2019), many have wondered why not change this problem to this solution.

So, there is an expectative about the game-based teaching and learning contribution to improve student engagement, increase teamwork and improve student motivation in the disciplines. According to (Liuta et al., 2019). the introduction of game-based learning methods, increases the interest and understanding of engineering students and even improves their capacity of self-learning. Based on all these statements, the main objective of this paper is to answer the question: In what degree are engineers’ professional competences influenced by game-based learning methods? This core question, and its related central objective were deployed in secondary ones. Table 1 shows the connection among them and the research steps addressed in the research, while Figure 1 summarizes the flow of the research steps mentioned in Table 1.