Interactive serious games as electronic engineering capstone projects

Capstone projects are projects that engineering students undertake in their final year of study. The capstone project gives the student the opportunity to showcase what she has learned during her studies, and gives the academic study leader the opportunity to test important skills necessary to be an engineer. In this project, interactive, serious games for children are proposed as capstone projects for electrical and electronic engineering final year students. Students created an electronic device that would be attached to a child, record motion and then transmit that data to a computer game where the motion gets transformed into appropriate game interaction. The child thus plays the game by moving around. The aim of the game is to encourage the child to be an active participant and, in some cases, may also be used for therapeutic intervention. In addition to meeting the required exit level outcomes and contributing to the growth of graduate attributes, these students' experiences were enhanced by being exposed to problems outside the realm of engineering, being confronted by ethical and usability issues, being exposed to multi-disciplinary interactions and an opportunity to use their engineering ability in different engineering fields. This paper describes the experiences of the study leaders and students in using a project of this nature in 2017.