Digital Lockdown: A 3D adventure game for engineering education

Abstract

Gaming in education has gained a great deal of interest for its potential positive impact on student learning. Video games can be a powerful learning tool, with the potential of reaching a wide range of people with diverse learning styles. Students in today's college classroom are known as ‘digital natives’ those who grew up with technology all around them (cell phones, laptops, and tablets). These students often know more about technology than their parents and teachers Games have a positive impact on how young people learn complex things. Content, skills, creativeness, and system thinking are just a few things that can be learned from games. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a 3D educational game for deployment on the PC and Mac. Currently, no truly 3D games are available that focus on teaching core concepts in Digital Logic Design or Electrical and Computer Engineering concepts in general. This work presents an overall design and implementation of an educational 3D adventure game to address Number Systems, Boolean algebra, and Combinational and Logic Design in the scope of the Electrical and Computer Engineering curricula. Digital Lockdown is a game, developed in Unity 3D, that takes place in an outer space engineering research facility. The research facility has been placed on digital lockdown due to an experiment gone wrong and the player must use his/her knowledge of digital logic to override the lockdown protocols. The player is faced with tasks that help assess basic knowledge of digital logic. The game also contains learning zones where the player can go in order to learn the information needed to complete the tasks.