2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Evidence Based Practice paper will present an analysis of the use of board game design to teach the engineering design process and project management skills to first-year civil engineering students.
Understanding and application of the engineering design process as well as development of project management skills are critical for student success in an engineering degree. As first-year students enter university at differing levels of technical ability, it can be difficult to create an immersive and engaging introductory experience that reinforces these foundational skills without relying on a deeper understanding of technical material. In fact, for some students, introductory projects with roots in highly technical material may be alienating, damaging to student confidence, and ultimately detrimental to measures of academic success and degree persistence. These factors served as motivation for the development of an innovative introductory engineering course that exposes students to critical concepts and skills without alienating them based on perceived ability or actual preparedness levels. This work proposes the introduction of “analogous context immersion” as a means of fully immersing student learning of an unfamiliar concept into a familiar context – in the case of this work, fully immersing learning of the engineering design process and project management skills into the context of designing a tabletop game.
The first-year introductory course, co-taught by instructional faculty, focused on project management skills and design concepts by tasking civil engineering students with creating tabletop games that could be used in outreach events to teach civil engineering concepts to young audiences. The lab component of the introductory course was organized so that, each week, students were introduced to and gained experience with a step in the engineering design process. Reinforcing the concept that the engineering design process is critical to practicing civil engineering, relevant examples from practice were used to connect steps in the design process to the field. Upon completion of the project, teams created a fully playable tabletop game that met given design constraints and a technically written instruction manual that thoroughly outlined gameplay and presented the final product to their peers.
Student performance was assessed via direct assignment, as well as student feedback and observation. In the middle of the term, student knowledge was tested by having them create unique graphical representations of the engineering design process. This low-stakes, formative assessment showed strong levels of student understanding of the design process. Student feedback was collected informally throughout the term through conversations, as well as formally during end of term course evaluations. Student engagement was also assessed via observation during the final exam period.
This work presents an analysis of the use of analogous context immersion as a novel approach to teach first-year civil engineering students foundational concepts and skills related to the engineering design process and project management. As a result of the course, self-led student groups followed the engineering design process and created unique tabletop games that will be used to introduce civil engineering concepts to younger members of the local community and create outreach opportunities for the civil engineering department.