An Attempt to Gamify a First Course in Thermodynamics

The first course in thermodynamics has traditionally been a challenge for students in engineering programs. The course typically introduces students to concepts of energy and continuum mechanics, both of which are novel to the students. Often, the theory relies upon still-new calculus concepts for the students. With such a dense topic, this course is most often delivered in a traditional lecture-based structure. In a program throughout 7 partner universities, this first course in thermodynamics has a reputation for being the “weed-out” course for students. In the fall of 2013, the author took an established course having 6 lab experiments, a popular textbook, a well-evolved syllabus, and overturned the motivational structure to create a new delivery model for the course. The “Thermo-Fluids 1” course became, to students, the 7-mission “Hunt for Energy and Power”. The same textbook was used in the new delivery model as had been used previously; the same laboratory experiments were undertaken by students, but students had a different approach to the workload. Throughout the course, students proceeded at their own pace, and completed 7 “missions”, each with 5 levels of performance. The first 3 levels were successively more complex analytical problems. The 4th level was a lab report based on a moderately challenging open-ended lab experiment, and the 5th level was an opportunity for the student to extend a concept based on the content of the earlier lab experiment. The concept of “Design” was built into the course in a limited, but content-rich mode through having students each propose, conduct, and report on an improved development or experiment. In this paper, the author presents the results of this attempt at “gamifying” a thermodynamics course, and illustrates this one model for bringing student-directed learning into a heavy content-based course.