Enhancing divergent thinking in engineering students through gamification: development and evaluation of the IdeaTRIZ-X board game

Teaching and learning methodologies have recently been changing. The use of gamification techniques and game-based learning based on digital platforms has grown in recent years. However, physical board games are used much less than digital board games. Some authors justify the use of board games to improve divergent thinking. To catalyze this effect in design engineer students, we have developed a new board game based on the TRIZ10 creative approach. The card distribution was established using a new method, parTRIZ, suitable for considering the probability of each group of inventive principles of the TRIZ contradiction matrix. A total of 6 physical copies of a new board game, IdeaTRIZ-X, version 3.0, were developed. Manufactured version of IdeaTRIZ-X (version 3.0) were used by 5 group of students (a total of 24 students—70.8% female) after running traditional brainstorming sessions for solving a problem. Surveys show an increasing student motivation, but also, quantitively, it has been obtained a promising result of multiplying the fluency ratio (ideas / hour) by 4.1, both results, in comparison with traditional brainstorming sessions. Artificial intelligence analysis supports these findings. Additionally, the board game could be used in other subjects, even for solving problems in professional environments.