First-Year Engineering Students' Environmental Awareness and Conceptual Understanding with Participatory Game Design as Knowledge Elicitation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to investigate first-year undergraduate engineering students' awareness and conceptual understanding of environmental issues and to examine how effective a participatory game design strategy was to elicit their understanding. Respondents (n=1,394) completed baseline environmental awareness surveys and 24 respondents participated in the game design process consisting of four workshops and online activities. The game design component was focused on life cycle analysis (LCA) including environmental impacts of engineering design. Observations and artifacts were collected from workshops and interviews were conducted. Results showed that students had a general awareness about environmental issues but lacked awareness about LCA, pollution, and wetlands. Additionally, the participatory game design process showed that students struggled with applying the newly gained understandings of LCA in the game designs. The participatory game design provided a wealth of information on students' understanding and also served as an effective platform for knowledge elicitation.