Is game-based learning suitable for engineering education?

A simple evaluation question for any educational software is: did the students learn, by using that product, what they were supposed to? It is a simple question to ask, but difficult to answer because learning is an individual process and there are normally too many factors involved. Therefore, benchmarking educational software is a complex task and a complete evaluation process requires a holistic approach where the evaluator, in order to understand how students learn, must determine how and whether the learning objectives were achieved with the educational software. When we talk about Game-Based Learning, we refer to a very specific type of educational software, games, with very definite properties and characteristics. Games develop personal characteristics that can contribute to becoming a good engineer. The purpose of this article is to present an evaluation framework that assesses the efficiency of this pedagogical approach in Engineering Education.