Gamification in Construction Engineering Education: A Scoping Review

The long history of experiential learning in construction engineering shows the significant potential of cognitive development through direct experience. Recent advancements in gamification, especially digital serious games, can help educators develop novel pedagogical strategies to promote active and experiential learning in controlled settings. Despite considerable attention to this field during the last two decades, game-based educational solutions for construction engineering are far from achieving their full potential, and still little is known about systematic ways to direct research and development works in this domain. The first step toward developing systematic plans to advance research in this area is to analytically understand the extent, range, and nature of the existing research to identify research gaps and potential directions for future studies. This study addresses this need through a scoping review based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis extension for Scoping Review (PRISMA-ScR). Throughout the research process, we identified 103 relevant studies. We extracted two sets of information from each document during the review process. The first set incorporates basic attributes of the publications, including the type of the document, publication year, and author affiliation. The second set of information concentrates on the contents of the documents to analyze their contextual characteristics and contributions to the field. Using the extracted information, we discuss the limitations in the state-of-the-art research in this rapidly growing field and propose a set of potential directions and considerations for future studies.