New Grant: Professional Practice Simulations for Engaging, Education and Assessing Undergraduate Engineers

At present, the pool of engineers in the US is not sufficient or diverse enough to meet the needs of a growing high-tech community and produce solutions to the difficult problems our country faces both nationally and internationally. Therefore, harnessing the power of new educational innovations to improve the teaching of engineering students is a top priority.

Epistemic Games Group has received funding to help us bring the experience and skills we’ve gained from our previous games to the undergraduate environment as we develop a new game for engineering students. Nephrotex: The Dialysis Redesign Project will provide a dialysis simulation based on authentic engineering practices. This game will be incorporated into an engineering undergraduate course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, allowing us to determine how well these students learn through playing the game, as opposed to through a more traditional textbook-based environment.

One advantage of a professional practice-based game is that it introduces skills and techniques not discussed in gatekeeper math and science courses. This should help convince students who otherwise would have been discouraged that they too can be engineers, and thus help to increase the diversity of the field.

The game will help to create learning materials, teaching techniques, and faculty experience. It will also make contributions to the knowledge about engineering education by conducting a robust evaluation of current theories of professional learning in a novel context. Once complete, the game will be shared with engineering institutions nation-wide, enabling faculty at a variety of institutions to adapt and customize it for their own use and research.

The Principal Investigator and Co-PI on this grant are Dr. David Shaffer and Dr. Naomi Chesler.  The grant, for $499,993, was awarded September 1, 2009 through the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education – Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Stage 2 project.  The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.