Developing design creativity: the potential for using engineering computer games

This study aims to understand the opportunities for the latest generation of physics-based engineering computer games to be used for remote engineering design education. The project will leverage these games to develop educational interventions to support student learning about the creative design process, including problem definition, concept generation, concept selection, concept development and prototyping. The effectiveness of those interventions will be assessed to permit recommendations to be made for educational uptake of such games, either as a replacement for similar physical activities (when required) or as an addition to them. The project will proceed in six stages: (1) review relevant prior work related to engineering education, design education, remote learning, distributed teams and gamification; (2) review the latest generation of engineering games, such as Poly Bridge (Dry Cactus) and Fantastic Contraption (Northway Games), focussing on their educational potential; (3) identify and develop tasks or levels for such games, focussing on opportunities for students to explore creative design activities and apply engineering science; (4) develop educational interventions using such tasks or levels, considering staged activities, team roles, offline calculations and predictions; (5) use controlled experiments to investigate the effectiveness of such interventions with student groups, both at CUED and other educational institutions (expand to professional groups if possible), (6) compare such interventions with physical design-build-test activities to identify gaps and overlaps in learning.