Designing a serious game to enhance orthographic projection learning in higher education

Nowadays, most university or college students are Digital Natives (Prensky, 2001). Their learning style and learning culture is quite different from their parents and teachers, who are Digital Immigrants (Prensky, 2001). Many previous research studies have shown that games are a powerful and effective tool (Michael & Chen, 2006) in many educational domains, such as military training (Lim & Jung, 2013; Yildirim, 2010), marketing (Devitt et al., 2015), management (Mayer 2006), health-care (Ribaupierre et al., 2014; Lynch-Sauer et al., 2011), foreign language learning (Johnson, 2010; Ludwig et al., 2009), computer programming (Xu, 2009), computer graphics (Mustaro, 2009), job-specific skills, politics (Bogost, 2010), etc. However, there is no specific research discussing how to use serious games to improve orthographic projection learning in a higher education setting. Technical graphics are an essential and fundamental basis of a technologist or designer education. The core of technical graphics is orthographic projection. Technical graphics communication skill is a critical and significant asset for students majoring in engineering, production design, industrial design, interior design, architecture, etc. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to develop a serious game, called ITouYing, for helping university students from the Net generation (Tapscott, 1998) or the Games generation (Prensky, 2003) to master orthographic projection in novel fashion. The ITouYing game is composed of nine sub-units, including 1) Orthographic projection concept, 2) Orthographic projection knowledge quiz, 3) Plane type judge, 4) Stain in plane, 5) Front view selection, 6) Top view selection, 7) Right side view selection, 8) Three view match, and 9) Proper 3-D model selection. The effectiveness of the ITouYing game towards learning was examined by surveys in the department of mechanical engineering, aeronautics and astronautics at the National Cheng Kung University and the department of industrial education at National Changhua University of Education. The evaluation results indicated that most of the university students(54%) favor using the ITouYing game, because it can enhance orthographic projection learning effectiveness interactively (84.9%) and also promote visualization skill between a 3-D model and it's multi-views (79.9%). Moreover, the participants perceive the stain in plane unit (unit 4) is the most satisfying unit (24.5%), and the proper 3-D model selection unit (unit 9) is the most helpful unit (22.3%) for learning orthographic projection. Furthermore, for more completeness, the IToYing game should broaden the scope of the survey by including participants from more different departments, and from more different universities. The valuable feedback collected from participants will be useful to refine the ITouYing game.