Designing a Gamified Learning Tool for Enhancing Project Monitoring Skills in Technical Engineering Projects: An Interdisciplinary Approach Integrating Project Management and Systems Engineering

This paper proposes the design of a gamified boardgame, the Project Monitoring Game (PMG), intended to help students practice the execution and monitoring process groups of technical engineering projects. The authors argue that while higher education covers project management and systems engineering theory well, especially initiation and planning, students rarely experience the high variability of real project execution, where progress must be tracked, risks mitigated, and scope, time, and cost baselines adjusted. The work positions gamification as a safe, engaging way to fill this gap, and the paper is best understood as a design proposal grounded in literature review rather than an empirical evaluation.

The methodology consists of a literature review spanning project monitoring, project management and systems engineering education, gamification, serious games, and interdisciplinary teaching, with search queries sorted by citation count and recency. Learning goals are drawn from the ISO 31000:2009 risk management principles, which the authors use to define outcomes students should be able to carry into future projects. The game design is structured around Chou's Octalysis framework, with each of its eight core drives mapped to concrete features such as storytelling about a life-saving project, checkpoints, leaderboards, random event cards, and limited-use resources. The avoidance drive is explicitly noted as not yet incorporated.

The proposed game is organized into three phases: a teacher-led planning stage defining timeframe and requirements, a core phase in which players play preventative cards and react to random events that alter a visual dashboard tracking scope, time, cost, and risk, and a final phase converting effort and wasted preventative measures into points. The authors state that details of cards, events, and the scoring system remain unresolved, and no participants were involved in creating the initial design. Testing with human participants is pending ethics committee review, so the game's effectiveness remains untested.