Engaging Students during Research through the Use of Games

Abstract

Engaging students during a research seminar/meeting can be a difficult challenge, and as as student myself, I can attest to how difficult actively listening to a presentation can be. As such, upon researching more ways to have an audience engaged, one of the most promising concepts is the use of games. Games, in any form, can be very engaging to a person, and even more so if there is active engagement and participation within an audience group. With this concept in mind, I decided to take it upon myself to create a game based around a theoretical computer science model, and see if I can have newcomers learn how the theoretical model works faster than during a normal presentation. I have worked with the concept of games various times before, and as such, I will include that work in this thesis for the sake of theme, and to argue that learning with games tends to be a lot easier than traditional forms of learning