2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Tinto’s Theory of Student Departure focuses on both a student’s academic and social integration as key components for student success. This Great Ideas for Teaching (and Talking With) Students (GIFTS) paper focuses on using tabletop board games to help first-year students develop useful academic traits such as critical thinking and teamwork, while also building social connections with fellow students, university faculty and staff, and local engineers. The paper provides examples of how board-game activities have been integrated into the first-year engineering experience to foster student persistence and skill development. The paper provides an overview of a formal 1-credit-hour honors seminar for first-year engineering students, taught by the authors, that focuses on board games. In this course, students examine connections between modern tabletop gaming and the engineering profession by actively playing commercially available board games and card games in community with classmates and others, supplemented with a combination of pre-class preparation materials and post-class reflection assignments. The paper also describes practical implementation details for how board games can be used in general STEM coursework, particularly in first-year engineering experiences, and outside of the classroom. The paper includes relevant examples from the literature for making games and playing games in the academic context for learning disciplinary content, developing professional skills, and fostering social connections.