Gaming and Interactive Visualization for Education: A Multi-Disciplinary and Multi-University Collaborative Project

Most people are more perceptive to the geometric rather than the symbolic representation of information. In engineering disciplines, visualization combined with game characteristics can provide an essential mode to facilitate students’ understanding of important and abstract concepts, and improve students’ willingness to learn. In this project, game characteristics are introduced into course module design, but different from commercially available games in that the level of the contents and assessment tools in this project are meaningful to teachers, students, and parents. This paper focuses on the design of the Gaming and Interactive Visualization for Education system. Specifically, some initial design results from the three universities for three different courses plus the development of evaluation system will be presented. The system is expected to (1) offer interactions with gaming scenarios that can excite emotions, (2) provide an engaging learning experience of understanding engineering concepts by allowing students to visualize and interact with 3-D objects in a game scenario, (3) employ situated learning by exposing students to the type of challenges they will face in industry, and (4) fit better with the learning styles of the majority of engineering students.