Gamifying and Evaluating First-Year Design: Development of a Questionnaire to Assess Student Experience and Motivation in a Large, Online Course

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to describe the development of a survey to evaluate a large, first-year,online, gamified engineering design course. Our literature review briefly summarizes the importance of engineering design experiences in terms of affective outcomes such as belonging and motivation, as well as the potential benefits of game elements and active learning in course design and delivery. However, fully online design courses have yet to be studied. After a brief description of our context, we provide a comprehensive literature review of the scales and surveys used in related education research and describe our questionnaire development process, resulting in a 61-question survey to assess our online course’s support of students’ intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and belonging. We present our survey, composed of newly developed questions as well as modified questions from literature, so that others may use and adapt it to theircontexts, and conclude with recommendations for future work.