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%0 Thesis
%A Dai, Rushi
%T Design and development of gamification as an educational support system for digital construction : enhancing learning and exploring the potential of digital twin integration
%I Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
%V Dissertation
%C Aachen
%M RWTH-2024-04418
%P 1 Online-Ressource : Illustrationen
%D 2024
%Z Veröffentlicht auf dem Publikationsserver der RWTH Aachen University
%Z Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2024
%X This dissertation explores the design and development of gamification as an educational support system for digital construction, with specific focus on the improvement of students’ learning effectiveness and the integration of Digital Twin technology within the gamified system. With the rapid advancements in technologies, many industries have been transformed and upgraded to the age of digitization via digital tools and strategies, including the construction industry to an innovative direction of digital construction. One of the effective strategies to support this transition is to educate new professions in the field of digital construction. However, the current education has revealed main challenges including lack of innovative teaching methods in this new discipline, gaps between theoretical knowledge and practice, difficulties in access to on-site facilities, insufficient motivation of students in studying this subject and more.The main objectives of this dissertation are to propose solutions to the current challenges in education of digital construction, and to research innovative technologies and methods for digital transformation in education. To achieve these objectives, this dissertation designed gamification methods and developed its system framework powered by a 3D game engine – Unreal Engine, bridging the gap between educational practices and the emerging concepts in digital construction. In addition, an application called DigitalCons (Digital Construction) was built as a use case for validation and a testbed for the integration of cutting-edge digital technologies within the proposed gamified system. The research addresses the following questions: 1) What gamification methods can be applied to promote the learning experiences and learning effectiveness of students, such as comprehension of digital technologies in construction, theoretical knowledge transfer in practical scenarios, and motivation in learning digital construction? 2) How can a development framework be designed and structured to facilitate the development of a flexible and extendable gamified system? 3) What are the technical challenges in the integration of innovative technologies like Digital Twin, and how can the integration enhance the learning effectiveness in digital construction? 4) What are the perceptions of its users and the learning outcomes of students after utilisation of the gamified system regarding functionalities, user experiences and learning effectiveness? To study these questions, literature reviews were done to establish a theoretical foundation for the gamification concept and to formulate hypotheses for validation. Then the gamification concept was designed and prototyped into the game-like application called DigitalCons powered by Unreal Engine for further testing and evaluation. In DigitalCons, construction-related contents were categorised into four sections: Safety, Machinery, IoT, and Processes, gamified with game elements and mechanics aligning with game psychology and enhanced by the integration of Digital Twin technologies. While game psychology helped to arouse students' enthusiasm for learning and deepen their memory, Digital Twin provided an immersive and realistic learning environment representing the twin of reality. To validate the gamification concept, DigitalCons was tested and evaluated by its developer, 9 experienced gamers and 30 students in aspects of functionality, user experience and learning effectiveness. Different evaluation methods were applied to gather data, such as ad-hoc testing, profiling tools, questionnaires, and open discussion. The invited students were divided into two groups, one learned with a gamified approach as the experimental group, and one learned with a non-gamified approach as the control group. The outcomes of both groups were evaluated and compared in the learning effectiveness of the two learning methods.The result of this study suggests effective design methods to gamify learning contents in Digital Construction. The development of DigitalCons via Unreal Engine provides an applicable, easy-to-use, extensible and collaborative framework, which also allows for easy integration and interfacing with digital technologies like Digital Twin. The evaluation outcomes of the gamified system demonstrate a positive impact on students’ learning effectiveness in knowledge comprehension and retention, knowledge transfer, and learning motivation and engagement. The experimental group performed better in knowledge transfer and gained more learning motivation and engagement, while the control group outperformed in knowledge retention. Additionally, positive attitudes towards the learning methods showed little impact on the learning outcome in knowledge comprehension and retention, as well as in knowledge transfer, however, strong impact on learning motivation and engagement.In conclusion, the gamified system proposed in this dissertation holds a great potential in the innovation and transformation of education in digital construction. Although there is still a large space for improvement, such as refinement of gamification techniques, performance optimisation and determinism issue in Digital Twin simulation, these limitations should be addressed in future research to fully expand the possibilities of gamification.
%F PUB:(DE-HGF)11
%9 Dissertation / PhD Thesis
%R 10.18154/RWTH-2024-04418
%U https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/985062