Use of Role-play and Gamification in a Software Project Course

Soft skills are increasingly important to the engineering profession and course modifications are often needed to ensure students have opportunities to practice them prior to graduation. This suggests that engineering programs need to go beyond simply offering industry-based capstone courses and internships. Role-play has a long history as a tool for learning. It can be used to simulate real world practices in environments where consequences can be mitigated safely. In this paper, we discuss the use of team role-play activities to simulate the experience of working in a professional, game development studio as a means of enhancing an advanced undergraduate game design course. In conjunction with the role-play, a gamification framework was used within the course to allow students to customize their course participation. Gamification was used to reward students for compliance with software process steps and for taking the initiative to improve their “soft skills”. In this project, allowing students to negotiate the nature of their activities and rewards helped them develop those skills. We are using student feedback and our own lessons learned to plan the next iteration of this course

Stop sanitizing project management education: Embracing Desirable Difficulties to enhance practice-relevant online learning

By resisting the temptation to “sanitize” project management education, we show how embracing unpredictability and authenticity can enhance learning. In response to COVID-19 restrictions, we moved an interactive role-play online and explored the resultant learning through analysis of student performance and students’ individual reflections. Findings suggest that the online role-play boosted learning by exposing students to a challenging environment, which included tasks that stretched their capabilities and thus enhanced the level of “Desirable Difficulties”. Drawing on the concepts of Desirable Difficulties and “role-play-as-rehearsal”, we discuss the benefits of formative “testing” and propose a new concept: “role-play-as-testing”. Additionally, benefits to learning were attributed to the online setting, which reflects the increasing virtualization of practice. We hope to inspire other educators to embrace Desirable Difficulties and resist the temptation to sanitize project management education to create opportunities for future project leaders to test their learning in authentic settings

Configuración y gestión de una planta HDA virtual

This work exposes how an HDA plant was configured and managed virtually, grouping students of the degree of industrial chemical engineering in work teams where each individual would develop a previously defined role. For this, a tool called Monitor8 was used through which the now workers could interact with the environment created for the plant, developing the tasks of their position in a "role game". To allow the understanding of the system, the necessary material was planned to deliver to the students in the form of user manuals and short seminars in order to complement. Within the information provided, a series of scenarios, stipulated action procedures, instructions and short practices to be developed to put into practice what was learned in various subjects of the industrial chemical engineering degree were explained. At the end of the experience, a survey was carried out on the students in order to know their assessment of the tool. According to a large majority, the experience was satisfactory, the tool comfortable to use, they would value the inclusion of more similar practices, they saw a good challenge for their technical and general skills, and they reinforced previously acquired knowledge