2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the contemporary landscape of STEM education, a significant challenge lies in ensuring student engagement and facilitating the understanding of complex engineering concepts. Traditional teaching methods are passive and often struggle to engage the young generation of students sufficiently. While passive learning is important for understanding and remembering concepts, it is not efficient for developing high-level skills, such as applying, analyzing, and evaluating the material. The active learning approach, where students learn by engaging with the content, is beneficial for the development of high-level skills in students and has been shown to improve learning and retention. Interacting with the content better engages students which helps them improve their concentration and deepens their learning. Hence, visions for engaging instructional methods such as game-based learning need to be explored for STEM education. The young generation of students is habituated to television and video games; therefore, an opportunity exists to integrate popular media-based themes with educational content to create enriched learning experiences. This paper presents a novel approach of game-based learning: the Television Media-based Educational Game (TMEG). Conceptually, TMEG provides a framework to embed the educational content within an engaging narrative inspired by a popular TV series, aiming to enhance both student engagement and learning. TMEG incorporates 3D models, animations, and visuals tailored to introduce different engineering principles. The game's narrative is crafted to mirror themes from a TV series, selected based on student interests, creating a relatable and immersive learning environment.
This study developed a prototype game for an introductory Materials Science and Engineering course. This process consisted of two steps: First, a student survey was conducted to identify the TV series that is popular among the students. This provided the backdrop of the game. The survey also identified the course concepts that students find challenging, which formed the educational content of the game. Second step focused on the technical development of the game using the TMEG framework. Unity game engine was used to develop the game that embedded the identified educational content within the selected TV series-based theme. The game used game tasks, animations, videos to deliver the educational content within the game narrative. The outcomes of this research could lay a foundation for the future development of innovative and engaging educational games and extend the reach of such pedagogical strategies across various STEM and non-STEM fields.