Do carrots make you strong? Motivational and teamwork effects of gamification of professional development for first year engineering students

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in developing leadership capacity among engineering students, but these efforts are often split between curricular and co- curricular initiatives. This paper reports on an attempt to bridge these two worlds by using in-class incentives for first-year students to participate in leadership workshops. Findings are that team leaders participate at higher than average rates, that students surveyed had attended a large number of workshops and gave on average more detailed feedback than previous cohorts. However, there was no major evidence of greater team-member effectiveness among those who participated in workshops.