Gamification shapes engineering digital skills
Gamification shapes engineering digital skills
Gamification shapes engineering digital skills
By Mark Chillingworth
August 6, 2020
Summary
With 5G networks rolling out across the world, sensors being placed on each and every moving part or touchpoint, the Internet of Things is bringing engineering and digital together into a single industry.
"You cannot have engineering without digital," says David Ivell, CTO and Chief Innovation Officer with Enginuity, the engineering sector charity that supports engineering employers, training providers and engineers in the UK. Enginuity has machined Skills Miner, a Minecraft game in response to the engineering sector's demand for digitally oriented talent.
As engineering and digital come together, games can be the Lego bricks that build the skills engineering firms need to augment their physical engineering strengths.
"Darren Martin, CTO of engineering firm Wood Group, is combining building structures like wind turbines and oil pipelines, with digital elements to create new services."A digital twin of an energy fluid dynamics can spot a leak and then automatically turn off the pumps.
"Before such security solutions were in place, some engineers might have been in danger when they went out to fix an asset." Minecraft is arguably a digital twin of the world we live in, and drones may have started out as toys, but are augmenting and protecting engineers in the aircraft, oil and utilities sectors.
"Engineering is seen as hard to enter if you cannot show your skills academically. There are big world problems out there, and we need the next generation of engineers to be really smart," Ivell says of why it is important to widen the goal posts, to ensure a greater range of skills and passions to discover engineering.
The game works the other way round too - gamification is demonstrating to a wide audience that engineering is problem solving, thus showcasing the industry to individuals that previously didn't consider it as a career option.
"We can tell them there are new skills opening up in somewhere like Tokyo for example and then how do you plan for that?" Pure digital businesses are also paying closer attention to the engineering sector, including consultants Accenture and network specialists Cisco.
For engineering CTO Martin at Wood Group, improvements in developing the skills of the next generation of digital engineers is essential: "A lot of engineering workers are nearing retirement, creating a skills gap. So we need to up-skill our workers," he says.
"The solution is often digital. For example, 'Skype in a hardhat' can provide video and voice communications that allow our experts in central hub locations to see what is going on at the frontline, and guide engineers through complex or unfamiliar tasks." It is not a major leap for those calls to be recreated into a Minecraft or virtual reality game, creating an engineering equivalent to the simulator flights pilots undergo.
Reference
Chillingworth, M. (2020, August 06). Gamification shapes engineering digital skills. Retrieved September 28, 2020, from https://www.idgconnect.com/article/3578790/gamification-shapes-engineering-digital-skills.html