2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This GIFTS paper describes an effort to engage first-year engineering students in various aspects of the engineering college through a gamified approach.

In the last 20 years, many engineering programs have started a first-year engineering program, designed to provide a foundational experience to their incoming students. Though these programs vary widely in content, timing, and duration, these programs have been shown to help with retention, community and identity development, and a forum to gain important foundational skills for engineering. Additionally, these programs offer opportunities to introduce students to the university, college, and major in which they are now enrolled, as well as student success efforts. In addition to these activities inside the classroom, a great deal of benefit has been shown from student engagement in extra- and co-curricular activities, including a greater sense of belonging and increased academic achievement. However, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, many first-year students do not engage in these valuable activities, for a range of reasons including lack of information, feeling overwhelmed, and intimidation.

In effort to encourage students to take part in extra-curricular activities, one engineering college within a small, rural private University has historically required students enrolled in engineering orientation to attend two professional society meetings during the course of the class and report their attendance at these meetings to their faculty. However, this approach resulted in high faculty work load, student disengagement, and other issues. Additionally, while students typically attended their required professional society meetings, they were not engaged in other activities that are known to be high-impact, such as visiting faculty office hours and interacting with teaching assistants (TAs). In effort to address these, a gamified approach was developed and implemented during fall semester 2023.

This approach took the form of a booklet, called a passport, which contained pages for activities that students were required to complete over the course of the semester. These activities, which included attending professional society meetings, and visiting faculty offices, were identified through research regarding high-impact student practices and alignment with course outcomes. Once students completed these activities, they received a stamp from the faculty member or student leader.

At the end of fall semester 2023, the passports will be assessed using survey data, qualitative reports from faculty and students, and other insights gained. These responses will be used to make recommendations for improvements in future iterations of the passport, as well as recommendations for others as they transfer this into their own context.