Serious Games in Engineering: The Current State, Trends, and Future

Games have garnered recent attention within the engineering education realm, owing to advancements in computing technology and lowered barriers to entry for game development, with Game Engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity3D being free in a non-commercial, educational capacity. The present paper seeks to investigate 28 relevant studies which have reported games for teaching engineering courses within the past decade. These studies were obtained after extensive Scopus search queries and filtered manually according to 8 research questions. Key questions we seek to investigate are what genre of games are being employed, disciplines most often targeted for gamification, assessment tools used to gather data on student learning within gamified settings, learning outcomes and attitudes towards game modules for students' engineering courses and as well as data analysis/collection methods.