A collaborative city-based game to support soft skills development in engineering and economics

Abstract

HERA is an Erasmus+ project aimed at the development of soft skills in higher education engineering and economics students through collaborative serious games. It proposes a digital learning game platform whose goal is to expose students to complex challenges, the solution to which requires integration of knowledge from diverse fields in a manner that simulates how engineering and economics professionals work and collaborate in the real world. The platform shows the typical landscape of a virtual city game, like SimCity, where it is possible to perform different actions to develop a city in an appropriate and suitable way. Available scenarios involve problems related to sustainable mobility, smart parking solutions, circular economy related to recycling, flood management, e-commerce development, Olympic Games management and even COVID. Gamifying the problem-solving process will promote active student engagement in learning through a sense of mission, a sense of affiliation, healthy competition, rewards, and social recognition by peers among other mechanisms.