Development of a Gamified Educational Framework to Teach Mechanical Engineering to High School Students

Abstract

Mechanical engineering has been the driving force of the German economy in the past century. Mechanical engineers have been enjoying a high reputation ever since the industrial revolution. A steadily increasing number of students joined the university to enroll in mechanical engineering. However, the numbers of students are declining recently. Experts speculate about the reasons; the causes may be linked to the current green movement and a decreasing reputation of mechanical engineering related to the Dieselgate, or an old-fashioned status due to emerging technologies in the field of digitalization and uprising tech-companies. In order to increase the interest of high school students towards the field of mechanical engineering, we created an app based on gamified engineering educational, that aims to teach the holistic interdisciplinary nature of mechanical engineering and its benefits for a sustainable, digital world. The content is taught superficially and is supposed to invoke curiosity towards mechanical engineering. The gamified content was developed by considering intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of self-determination theory and is combined with player types that have been researched as a foundation of gamification theory.