2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

One important goal of higher education is to teach students to become a lifelong learner. A common way to do so is to ask students to explore relevant topics/techniques beyond the basic concepts and assignments within a course. Instructors often find it difficult to motivate students to do this additional work. In this paper, we present a gamification framework with a focus on encouraging exploratory learning in college-level STEM courses. The framework also helps with improving inclusion and student engagement. This framework gives a detailed guideline on how to convert a course into a role playing (RPG) game, including the type of story lines that will interest students, the design of a game store with different rewards to motivate students’ participation and various types of quests with different exploratory learning objectives. The paper will also include detailed case studies on gamifying three STEM courses from different disciplines: a Software Engineering course, a Mechanical Engineering course and a Computer Science course. We will evaluate student feedback, summarize common findings, and propose future improvements.