Gamification for Non-Majors Mathematics: An Innovative Assignment Model

Abstract

The most important ingredient of the pedagogy for teaching non-majors is getting their engagement. This paper proposes to use gamification to engage non-majors. An innovative game termed as Cover the Hungarian’s Zeros is designed to tackle the common weakness of non-majors mathematics in solving the assignment problem using the Hungarian Method. Non-majors mathematics always fail to draw the correct lines to determine the optimality of the solution, which gives two negative implications: (1) revise the opportunity cost wrongly in the subsequent step; (2) arrive at false optimality where optimal assignment cannot be made. The innovative game has been introduced to non-majors from business major. The results show that it works. The engagement from the gamification based teaching innovation also help to improve visual-spatial processing skill.

Keywords: Gamification, Non-majors, Engagement, Hungarian assignment model