Iteration by Design: Development of a Game-based Workshop for Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship Concepts

Game-based activities are great tools for engaging students within the classroom as an alternative to the traditional transmission model. These types of activities can provide experiential learning opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship skills like creative problem solving, understanding preconceived constraints, teamwork and communication. Game-based activities use elements like goals, scaffolding of content and immediate feedback, and have been proven as successful learning tools in a variety of educational disciplines such as business, education and social sciences. Although resources do exist to help faculty implement game-based practices within their classrooms in various disciplines, very few publications within engineering education focus on this form of pedagogy. As a means to increase the number of faculty members employing these techniques, the Ideas at Play group hosted a one day workshop in conjunction with the VentureWell Open conference and continued to support participants virtually in an effort to create a community of practice.