Civil engineering education relies on traditional methods of teaching, comprising mostly of deductiveinstruction by presenting the theory, followed by applications. This paper presents an alternative way forteaching foundation design to senior students, introducing a more inductive approach. The students arepresented with a project/game adapted to a real-world problem at the beginning of the course. They areasked to identify the correct steps and methods throughout the lectures, for reaching an appropriate solutionthat they document and present at the end of the course. To make the project more enjoyable, the projecthas the format of a game where the students compete with each other on completing the task faster andmore efficiently. The goal of this teaching approach is to enhance the ability of the students for problemsolving and the engineering way of thinking, while playing a game. In the end, the students were requestedto respond to a survey regarding the efficiency of this project/game on their learning. The results showedthat students prefer more inductive methods for a design course, feeling that this project made them thinkmore like engineers, while the ‘game’ twist of it made the whole course more fun.
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