Do Carrots Make You Strong? Motivational and Teamwork Effects of Gamification of Professional Development for First Year Engineering Students

Abstract

– There is an increasing interest in developing leadership capacity among engineering students, but these efforts are often split between curricular and cocurricular initiatives. This paper reports on an attempt to bridge these two worlds by using in-class incentives for first-year students to participate in leadership workshops. Findings are that team leaders participate at higher than average rates, that students surveyed had attended a large number of workshops and gave on average more detailed feedback than previous cohorts. However, there was no major evidence of greater team-member effectiveness among those who participated in workshops.

Gamification in Engineering Education in Canada: A Systematic Review of the Literature

“…Rapid Feedback [4,20,[22][23][24]27] Freedom of Choice [9,20,24,25,27] Freedom to Fail [4,20,[22][23][24]27] Narrative [20][21][22][23][24] Competition [9,21,22,[25][26][27] Cooperation [21,22,25,27] Points [7,9,25,28] Badges [9,11] Leaderboards [9] Leveling Up Progress Bar and Unlocks [4,9,22,27] Game Level [4,23] External Rewards [9,22,26] For gauging the success of the intervention, the survey instrument was the most frequent evaluation metric used by authors, which was present in 8 out of the 15 papers (53%). While 5 out of these 8 papers had the survey as their only metric, the other 3 used this ins...…”