Digital Addiction Put to Positive Use: Teaching a Mechanical Engineering Course Through a Video Game

 

Academics and video games go together about as well as oil and water in most cases; gaming takes up valuable time that should be dedicated to studying, or as gamers may view it, studying takes up valuable time that should be dedicated to gaming. Throw “digital addiction” into the mix, and study time shares plummet like wounded pterodactyl. But like everything engineering revolves around, this is just another problem that needs to be solved, or in this case, a solution waiting for a problem to discover it.

Northern Illinois University (NIU) students rated their traditional numerical methods course  “as one of the least important classes in the curriculum,”  according to Coller and Scott, (2009) who also indicated that very numerical methods course consists of “the fundamentals that undergird most of the modern engineering and scientific computational tools that have become indispensable in contemporary practice.” So there it is: the problem. Students were placing low importance upon a fundamental aspect of their education, and something needed to be done to reverse this. Considering how un-engaging the textbook materials were, it was clear that the topic needed a massive boost to increase engagement with the materials.

This resulted in the advent of NIU-Torcs; a car racing game built on the open-source Torcs game graphics engine, with enhancements to allow application of numerical methods to “guide students through engaging and authentic engineering problems.” (Coller and Scott, 2009). In 2005, NIU began offering their numerical methods course to undergrads using NIU-Torcs, which requires writing  C++ programs to operate their race car by writing commands for every aspect from how much and when to accelerate, brake, shift gears, and steer. Students must calculate how fast the race car can safely take various curves without skidding out, and are encouraged to push the limits of their race car’s performance by incorporating a competitive aspect to their final project.

Students seek sources outside the video game to learn numerical root finding, solving systems of linear algebraic equations, differentiation, integration of functions and ordinary differential equations, curve fitting, and simple optimization. For a detailed description of the tasks, and the numerical techniques used to solve the tasks, the interested reader is encouraged to see Coller (2007). The semester climaxes with an open-ended project in which students form teams and participate in a friendly competition. The final project rewards technical acumen as well as creativity. A 6 min video highlighting the students’ work is posted at the web site: www.ceet.niu.edu/faculty/coller/video.htm. (Coller and Scott,2009)

One of the notable aspects about how numerical methods applied via NIU-Torcs were significantly more engaging, and thereby more effective, than the textbook alternative was when it came to root finding problems. Engaging in these problems through the game made students want to solve the problems since that is required to progress in the game, and builds upon virtual engineering problems parallel to real world problems. This inspired students to devote more time to learning the materials, as demonstrated by the results of a survey administered by the researchers of this NIU study. Fig. 1, shown below, reflects that the game based course garnered roughly twice the time on task than other courses when averaged. The course marked with an asterisk (*) represents another course taught by the same instructor who taught the game-based course, while the D represents the senior capstone design course.

Fig. 1: Average number of hours students spend outside of class each week on work for each core mechanical engineering class in the undergraduate curriculum (Coller and Scott, 2009).

Considering the time students were willing to invest in the program, it’s no wonder that deeper comprehension of these materials was over 2.5 times as high through the NIU-Torcs course as with the traditional course. This also lead to a massive increase in how important students ranked the course itself.  Not only were students given a course in video game form which demands more engagement to begin with, but students were put into positions of practicing actual engineering rather than doing the book-work of mere students and were clearly empowered by it. This showcases the value of hands-on learning with real-world (or virtual versions of it) problems to solve, along with how video games can be co-opted by education in an effective manner, making them a tool for learning rather than a rival to it.

More specific information on this study, along with a great deal of references and links to other studies either connected to or related to this study can be found in the original text, which is quite a fun rabbit hole to jump into...but you don’t have to take my word for it; Effectiveness of using a video game to teach a course in mechanical engineering

This raises a lot of additional questions specifically revolving around why we aren’t seeing more of this type of teaching mechanism being utilized more often. This study was conducted in 2009, and despite the ever increasing number of gamers and digital addicts in general, actual education in the form of video games just doesn’t seem to be implemented very often. Considering how much of a success this study was in terms of increasing study time, understanding of content, and perceived importance of the course, one would think this would become more common. Then again, considering the niche nature of many of the courses which would benefit the most from it, numerical methods courses in relation to engineering, for example, marketing games like this to the masses would be pointless since few people would have a reason to play them. Therefore, perhaps more of these games do exist, but only those involved in specialized areas of learning know about them. I’m sure more digging would eventually squeeze some out of the woodwork.

I have to level with you, though; all this reading about video games that teach engineering made me want to play, and if you’re a gamer at all, I’ll go out on a limb and assume that it may have inspired you to do the same. While I cannot seem to find a way to link you to the actual NIU-Torcs game, here are two links to lists of games that may not teach a person numerical methods or other engineering applications, but still serve as materials for learning and getting those gears moving in the ol’ brain:

Mechanical Engineering Games: Fun for Engineers!, 15 Great Computer Games for Engineers That Will Get You Hooked. 

Popular, mainstream games such as Tetris, Minecraft, Fallout 4, SimCity, and Portal can be found on these lists, along with smaller, less mainstream games like SpaceChem for those into chemistry and chemical engineering. I’m admittedly a sucker for Rube Goldberg machines, so Rube Goldberg inspired puzzle game series such as The Incredible Machine, Crazy Machines, and their successors are right up my alley (although older, and proving to be less-than-easy to find). Check them out for yourself, and hey, if you have any favorite engineering, physics, or general learning games that you enjoy, please do us all a favor and shout them out in the comments.

Works Cited

B.D. Coller, M.J. Scott, Effectiveness of using a video game to teach a course in mechanical engineering, Computers & Education, Volume 53, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 900-912, ISSN 0360-1315, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.05.012

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131509001201)