WIP: Using Game-Based Approaches to Overcome Passivity in Virtual Data Science Courses Students

Already the traditionally taught face-to-face courses in data science suffered from passivity among the students. The sudden change from on-campus tuition to virtual classes, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, contributed to worsen the problem. An additional aggravating issue in the courses in the M.Sc. program High Integrity Systems is the large classroom setting of the tuition. In order to activate the students, we decided to adopt game-based approaches in these courses. In this paper, we explain how these approaches were applied in the data science courses, still using the constraint that the courses should be taught as large classroom courses. The virtual framework of the courses is also considered, since this remains an important factor in the pandemic. Furthermore, we discuss the preliminary results of the in-class usage of the game-based approach.