Serious games in management to support the active construction of knowledge in engineering studies

Abstract

University education has always sought to be in tune with generational and employability characteristics. Indeed, in recent years, the learner, overwhelmed by technological change, has continued to show quite different concerns and relationships to education. They find it difficult to stay focused and receptive for hours on end, especially when knowledge is conveyed in a frontal and purely theoretical manner.To address these issues, we have opted for an active pedagogy approach through “gamification” specifically in the teaching of management to engineering students.This paper seeks to describe the adoption of “Memoboost Game” and “World Cafe Stategy”, serious games for engineering courses in Computer Science, Electromechanics and Civil Engineering at ESPRIT (High school of Engineering and Technology).The aim of these games is to help engineering students to understand the analysis of the business environment and its strategic orientations in order to better understand their professional careers. Based on a peer-learning approach, these games have led to the analytical aspect of the learners towards a better collective construction of knowledge.They were successfully used in the framework of a business environment course aimed, as already mentioned, at a population of engineering students with no prerequisites in the field of management. This experimentation showed that the learning process was accelerated.This article presents the process of these games, the experimentation that was carried out and the results achieved.