Building the Engineering Competences Base Through Formative Assessment and Gaming

This article discusses some of the negative effects of Internet use on students. If in the past there was a strong motivation to seek for knowledge, nowadays we are facing a demotivation of students to search for information, precisely because the accessibility of the Internet is total. The gist of this phenomenon could be described by this question, which is often asked by students “Why should I learn if I can find out anything I want on the Internet?”. Besides presenting a new point of view on this issue, the present paper proposes a mechanism which uses active learning and formative assessment in order to help students improve their engineering competence.