Gamification of physics themes to nurture engineering professional and life skills

Abstract

Gamification is a new generation tool for engaging students at different levels of education, motivating them to achieve the expected learning outcomes with greater ease. The fun element of gamification invites students to playfully engage and appropriate the concepts they learn at a higher level of educational achievement as stipulated in the Bloom's Taxonomy of Education. Further, the next generation students of engineering are expected to master their profession at a superior level in order to be able to match the requirements of future workspace, which are expected to be fully technology-driven, making the content of their learning subservient to the skills they imbibe. Hence they need to be equipped with adequate professional and life skills, which prepare them to easily adapt to the fast changing global job scenarios of the future. With the advance of industrial revolution version 4.0, powered by Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and 3-D printing, large number of jobs that demands human intervention is systematically delegated to the modern machines. Such paradigm shift in manufacturing in particular and engineering in general anticipates that the future engineers will need to equip themselves both in professional and life skills, so that their career as engineers and technologists are not critically challenged by the modern technology invasion. It will push future engineers to further focus on their human core-competence, which may not easily be taken over by autonomous machines. These changes will necessarily bring a paradigm shift in engineering education too, making many of the contemporary practices redundant. Creative thinking skills are expected to reign supreme. Along with that the conflict resolution skills, communication skills, team work, etc. will also assume importance. Correspondingly, engineering education has to be re-imagined, supporting the contemporary requirements of professional development of the students of engineering. The current paper reports some concepts developed in view of gamification of various themes and concepts related to Engineering Physics taught at Rajagiri School of Engineering & Technology, India. A novel approach of identification of the action verb behind a physical concept, prior to the development of appropriate games, is suggested in this paper, whereby students are allowed to experientially appropriate the concept behind the physical concept playfully. Care is also taken to develop games that will simultaneously cater to the development of both the professional and personal skills of the engineering students. Thus, gamification is visualized here as a project to engineer a deeper and experiential understanding of the physical concepts as well as to nurture the required skills of modern students of engineering, simultaneously. The paper does not present games that are fully developed. Rather, it presents a novel approach towards developing games based on themes of Engineering Physics, meant for developing better understanding of those concepts and at the same time aid the development of soft-skills, values and attitudes suitable for a successful life and career of an engineer.