Creating Serious STEM Games by combining a Game Platform and Mathematical Software

The perceived complexity of many engineering courses is partly due to difficulty visualizing or interacting with the underlying mathematics. Traditional game-authoring environments lack STEM-related support, making them ill-suited to build serious games to explore these concepts. To address this iss...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Celorrio-Aguilera, Iris, Freire, Manuel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad a Distancia de Madrid (UDIMA)
Repositorio:udiMundus. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad a Distancia de Madrid
OAI Identifier:oai:udimundus.udima.es:20.500.12226/972
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12226/972
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Serious games
Engineering education
Serious game technology
Serious STEM games
Visualization
Games
Tools
Software
Mathematics
Descripción
Sumario:The perceived complexity of many engineering courses is partly due to difficulty visualizing or interacting with the underlying mathematics. Traditional game-authoring environments lack STEM-related support, making them ill-suited to build serious games to explore these concepts. To address this issue, we have integrated an external math tool into the Unity game-authoring environment, and tested it by creating a game to teach basic concepts of mobile communications to engineering students. Players of the game had to fine-tune parameters in a simulated spectrum analyzer. We describe how we integrated STEM support for the generic authoring platform that we used, and present results from a pilot test of our game. We believe that this approach is extensible to a wide range of STEM disciplines.