Kuxtal: Student Motivation Through Megagames in Higher Education Design Students

"Kuxtal" examines whether megagames, large-scale role-play simulations built around collaboration and resource management, can motivate Industrial Design students in Mexican higher education to engage with complex, real-world problems. The game was created by seven professors at Tecnológico de Monterrey and centers on water-related challenges such as scarcity, pollution, and mismanagement. Its design responds to pressing local conditions in Hermosillo, where roughly 71% of water is drawn from underground aquifers, and it is structured around eight phases that guide participants through the negotiation of these "wicked" problems.

The study's central thesis is that experiential learning through megagaming can enhance student motivation and research engagement. Using the MUSIC model of academic motivation as its framework and a qualitative approach, the authors tested the game with 24 Industrial Design students, most of them women, during a week-long course. Survey results were encouraging: 17 of the 24 students strongly agreed that they enjoyed the teaching methods, 18 strongly agreed the methods captured their attention, and many expressed the view that the activity would be useful for their future professional work.

The authors present these outcomes as promising but preliminary. The game was run only once, with a small and demographically narrow sample from a single institution, and the findings therefore cannot yet be generalized across disciplines, regions, or student populations. The theoretical grounding draws on wicked-problem theory, play and gamification scholarship, and motivation research, reflecting an effort to connect design education to broader frameworks. Further iterations and larger, more diverse studies would be needed to establish whether megagames consistently produce sustained motivational gains in higher education.