2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Game-based learning has been studied for decades and shown to improve student engagement and retention of material. Most research at the college level has been conducted on digital games; however, such games are expensive and difficult to set up, can have a steep learning curve, and are often played alone. Board games, on the other hand, are relatively easy and inexpensive to set up and play and encourage face-to-face interaction among the players, which is important for student mental health and community-building.
Board games are a wonderful way to illustrate concepts of probability, and therefore were a natural addition to the junior-level core course, ISE 3414 – Probabilistic Operations Research (POR). The first game, Markopoly, was introduced to the course in the fall of 2023 as a learning tool when discussing discrete time Markov chains. The second, the Great Cave Escape, was developed by a group of students to illustrate the concepts of conditional probability models in the fall of 2023 and first played in class in the fall of 2024. In the fall of 2025, an undergraduate researcher was added to the project to make improvements to the games, increasing student engagement and enjoyment.
The use of board games to teach complex engineering topics is novel in the literature. If successful, these games could provide a model for games to be developed in other classes or by other faculty, to improve student learning and experience.