Thinking Like an Engineer

April 1, 2014

Well-designed video games can help students prepare for their careers. The Epistemic Games Group at WCER is headquarters for Games and Professional Simulations, a cooperative of six research groups across the country. These groups design online “virtual internships” for college students that require them to think like an engineer, urban planner, or science journalist. As an example, the UW–Madison College of Engineering offers a course that uses Nephrotex, a game in which students play the role of interns at a fictitious biotechnology firm that develops a hemodialysis ultrafiltration system to remove excess fluid or salts from a patient’s blood. Typically, engineering majors do not engage in such design work until late in their course of study, and many drop out after the first year or switch to another major. Virtual internships like Nephrotex give first-year students the opportunity to be designers immediately, therefore providing them with the excitement and motivation to persist in the field. A study of first-year undergraduates revealed that students who playedNephrotex were more confident and committed to engineering at the end of the semester than students who didn’t play the game. As the current pool of science majors in the United States is not large enough to meet the needs of our growing high-tech economy, virtual internships like Nephrotex can help build the country’s next generation of scientists. More:http://edgaps.org/gaps/projects/nephrotex/