Serious Games in Manufacturing Education: Evaluation of Learners’ Engagement

Presently industries need new generation of knowledge workers who are adept with the dynamics of manufacturing systems. Consequently, application of serious games as a promising learning method has emerged in manufacturing education. Serious game is aimed at learning rather than pure entertainment. Thus, evaluating the effectiveness of a serious game in improving the learning outcome is a paramount issue. In this paper, after reviewing efforts which have been made in serious games’ evaluation, the level of learners’ engagement that played the Set Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) game is examined. The game is designed at Politecnico di Milano, Italy to bring a hand-on experience on lean product development for practitioners and academia. The study is based on one company case in Italy. The results show that a high level of engagement among learners is exhibited based on the evaluation framework adopted.