Using serious games to teach manufacturing concepts and an evaluation study from teachers' perspective

An undoubted fact today for manufacturing industries is that they are looking for ways to transform their operations into a structure which allows them to be performing these operations coherent with sustainability aspect that is becoming more and more recognized every passing day. While this fact is becoming more significant as the time passes, the level of knowledge of the people who are initiators and performers of sustainability applications in manufacturing industries is started to be questioned. Accordingly, undergraduate engineers may be considered as the prospect executives of the future who will take responsibilities, and to be able to facilitate their learning about sustainable manufacturing by letting them transfer their knowledge in experience while they are still at university becomes essentially an area of research. It is said that currently traditional teaching and learning methods are not sufficient enough to attract today’s students’ attentions to engage them in manufacturing education therefore new fashioned approaches need to be focused on in order to prevent the shortcomings of traditional methods. Learning with games, may have the answer to this growing need because of the engaging solutions they provide for students which facilitate their learning by letting them feel the experience and live the moments. Therefore serious games term which may be defined as having the computer game features to achieve a particular educational objective comes into prominence. Although games are considered to be having a favorable potential to facilitate learning, there is a lack of emprical evidence to support this argument. Accordingly the necessity of an evaluation study is identified to be able to consider an effectiveness of a serious game. Given these facts and arguments, in this dissertation, first a literature review, that starts from broader terms and in the end focusing on sustainable manufacturing education, has been conducted to have an insight about the usability of game based applications in teaching sustainable manufacturing. As a result of the favorable results obtained, a serious game evaluation framework has been developed by analyzing and combining some features of existing frameworks and the evaluation sessions of Sustainable Global Manufacturing Serious Game have been conducted that is still being developed and currently considered to be one of the rare serious games directly focusing on sustainable manufacturing field. The evaluation study has been performed following a qualitative methodology with a total of nine teachers whose topic of interest is related to 8 sustainable manufacturing. The results demonstrated an indication of usability by teachers if the game works completely, and it revealed some redesign recommendations which needs to be taken into account by the designers of the game during its development phase.