Pre-Production of a Gamified Experience for Creating New Design Thinking Mindset

Abstract

In a rapidly changing world, Canadian Universities are preparing students by developing learner-centered experiential learning programs. Most of these programs within Engineering are mainly project-based courses to provide an opportunity for students to practice design-thinking process along with other technical skills. Engineering students are usually competent with the technical aspects of the design-thinking process, but they struggle to grasp the importance of the early steps that focus on understanding the challenge and generating ideas. A team of educators have come together to create gamified experiences to guide students through idea generation process. This mini-project is part of a larger work that focuses on the design and the development of a multi-component online course to train students in creating new engineering design thinking mindset. This paper that is a small piece of an on-going effort, focuses on the design and the test run of a gamified experience based on the concept of “what if?” question to help students to generate more ideas.