2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: Designing a Role Playing Game for an Astrobiology Course
Division: Entrepreneurship and Engineering Innovation (ENT)
Themes: #1 (Learning environments that foster innovation and entrepreneurship) and #3 (Cross campus collaboration beyond engineering)

This two year study of gamified learning environments that foster innovation in STEM courses will assess the impact of a role playing game (RPG) designed for an undergraduate astrobiology course at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). The beta version of the RPG entitled “Mission to Europa” was designed by undergraduates in an entrepreneurship elective course entitled INDS 430: Role Playing Game Design in the Fall of 2023. A collaborative team of students from mechanical engineering, computer science, biology, and game design were organized into a small “startup company” in three divisions: quest design, game mechanics, and game programming and media. They met regularly with their “client” - the professor of the astrobiology course - who described particular learning goals and assessments such as the previous midterm exam. Mission to Europa was then incorporated into the Spring 2024 Astrobiology course and managed by the game design students and game design professor.
Four of the ten game designers had experience as “dungeon masters” (DM’s) in various Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game events, and they based the Mission to Europa mission on similar D&D game mechanics (including a crew “job application” that served as a D&D character sheet). Astrobiology students then embarked on a manned mission to gather water samples from beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. They were challenged to select supplies and testing equipment for the spaceship, to engage in training exercises during the voyage to Europa, to deal with various emergency scenarios, to decide on the best landing site on Europa, and to gather and analyze samples for amino acid (or xeno amino acid) content. The final event of the RPG - analysis of samples - served as a final exam for the astrobiology students.
At the end of their semester, astrobiology students (who also represented various STEM majors at UMBC, including biochemistry, computer science, and mechanical engineering) offered feedback to both the game design and astrobiology professors.
The astrobiology course will be offered again in Spring 2025 with a redesigned Mission to Europa RPG incorporated into the second half of the course (after spring break), and mixed method assessments will seek to understand the impact of the RPG on student learning.