Board-Game-Based Gamification Improves Engagement in Petroleum Refining Engineering Course

Final-semester Petroleum Refining Engineering courses in the Oil and Gas Engineering program require sustained motivation to integrate complex and interdependent topics. This study investigates whether incorporating well-designed gamification can mitigate the course’s primary challenge by enhancing student engagement and interest, while facilitating their understanding and retention of key concepts. During the gamified sessions, a domain-specific board game for petroleum refining was utilized to enable team navigation through the session for two groups of a total of 52 final semester students. Outcomes were measured using exit surveys that employed a Likert scale. The outcomes showed uniformly positive perceptions across learning, organization, teamwork, instructor support, and coverage, with top-two (4–5) ratings of ~92–100% for Q1–Q11; workload was judged manageable (Q14 top-two = 88.5%), while difficulty displayed a wider spread (Q13), indicating productive challenge. These findings suggest that gamification is most effective as a motivational, application-oriented complement rather than a replacement for direct instruction. We recommend a blended approach: concise, well-scaffolded lectures to establish fundamentals, followed by targeted game-based activities to let students practice making decisions across the whole refinery process. Future work should pair satisfaction data with direct learning measures to tune game mechanics to challenging mechanisms and maximize learning gains.