Integrating Agile Methodologies and Gamification for Student Engagement and Success

This paper from Politehnica University of Timisoara proposes combining Scrum-based agile methods with serious games to address the largely theoretical character of industrial engineering instruction. Its target is a 4th-year Economic Engineering cohort taking a Computer-Assisted Manufacturing course. Drawing on literature that links agile principles such as iteration, collaboration, continuous feedback, and student empowerment to educational outcomes, the authors frame the approach as a way to make classroom learning more active and practice-oriented, and they propose engagement, learning outcomes, adaptability, and collaboration as key performance indicators for judging its impact.

The central empirical account concerns a seven-week, seven-Sprint project in which students designed and built a solar power bank in Autodesk Tinkercad, supported by the Agile Penny Game and the Siemens Energy Island game. Across the sprints, task completion rose from 50% to 95%, meeting participation grew from 40% to 100%, and quiz-measured learning outcomes improved from 50% to 95%. The authors conclude that gamified agile teaching strengthened engagement and understanding. They also note early difficulties, particularly confusion about incremental delivery, and observe that teams with strong soft skills adapted to agile practices more readily than those relying mainly on technical knowledge.

The scope is a single course in one institution, with results reported for one cohort over one semester-length project. The supporting evidence draws on prior work on bringing agile methods from industry into the classroom and on designing serious games for industrial engineering education. Readers should note that the reported gains are descriptive progress indicators from one implementation rather than the output of a controlled comparison.