Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning(Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Identifying Potential Game Participants
No full textThis paper describes some exploratory research relating personality to student reaction to a computerized management game. The basic premise underlying this research is that students react differently to different types of educational techniques. Anyone who has administered a management game has undoubtedly experienced this phenomena in that they have probably seen a wide spectrum of student response to the game. The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility that, that response can be predicted with personality measures. If it can be predicted, the administrator would have a helpful tool for the control of the educational experience. A variety of strategies becomes available such as controlling the structure of groups or eliminating undesirable players
Marketing in Action in Collegiate Education
No full textWhen I first began to try my hand at the development of simulation games in 1960, the business game was an exciting new tool for teaching decision making in a business context. The population of business games was still quite small at that point and most of them were “general management” games which dealt with the total firm’s operations at a highly simplified and abstract level. The “computer game” had caught the imagination of many business educators and a number of universities had made a major commitment of resources to the development of highly complex and sophisticated games as epitomized by the Carnegie Tech Management Game
Constructing Mini-Courses to Supplement Business Simulations
No full text"The potential for using business simulations to teach accounting and financial techniques and analysis has barely been tapped. In the early years of the development of business simulations, the primary objective was often to demonstrate the capabilities of the computer rather than to teach business management skills and techniques. In the early years and to a large extent now, participation in simulations has been on the basis of following hunches and trying to outguess the computer program. As long as simulations are carried out on this basis it is doubtful that they are worth the cost of the computer program time that it takes to score them. The real worth of business simulation is in learning to analyze data and using such analysis as the basis for simulation decision-making. One way to encourage this kind of approach to participation in a business simulation is to judge simulation participants partially on the techniques and procedures that they used in arriving at decisions. In a good simulation there will usually be a close relationship between the sophistication of the analysis used and the overall game results, however since the number of decisions in a given simulation are usually limited, the cream may not always have time to rise to the top.
Simulation in Personnel Administration
No full textThe use of simulation in the University classroom appears particularly appropriate at this point in time as students seem to believe only what they have experienced rather than the tutelage and admonitions of their elders. In fact, if students do not have first hand experience they are unlikely to believe or accept a statement or a concept as real. Thus, since an introductory course in Personnel Administration (or industrial psychology) may be quite tedious and extremely technical in nature, especially considering the details of test validation, an experiential based pedagogy appears appropriate. Recognizing the failure of the lecture approach and the technical nature of the course, it was decided that a practice set of experiential exercises similar to those used in courses such as accounting would be developed for the introductory course in personnel administration. At present, no complete set of exercises in personnel administration is known to exist, although there are components of the personnel course which can be taught through existing exercises such as role playing simulations for personnel interviewing and labor relations. Beyond these, there seems to be very little use of experiential learning in personnel administration
Marketing Interaction: A Marketing Management Game
No full textIncreasingly, teachers of marketing management have become cognizant of the need to use simulation games. Simulation games, providing students with the tasks of planning and implementing various strategy elements of the marketing mix, have been added to college-level courses in marketing management. Although games have been developed and adopted for courses in a single strategy area of marketing management such as advertising or sales management, the game, Marketing Interaction, discussed in this paper pertains to those college courses which focus on the management of all marketing activities
SIMQ, a Business Simulation Game for Decision Science Students: Towards a Total Gaming and Teaching Package
No full text"The business simulation game, SIMQ, was especially designed for teaching applications of quantitative methods. For the past four years, this game has been used in the quantitative methods sequence in the MBA program at Georgia State University. The game has also been adopted at several other teaching institutions and used in a number of seminars and short courses. While this game has been used in certain cases for teaching general business policy and decision making, the focus of this paper will be on the originally intended use of SIMQ as vehicle for teaching applications of quantitative models. In this paper, the manner in which the game is used to help meet the objectives of the quantitative methods sequence at Georgia State university will be explained. In addition, a gaming and teaching package, developed to assist instructors using SIMQ in the quantitative methods sequence will be described. This package consists of student assignments and related teaching materials, computer programs for quantitative applications, and a detailed instructor’s guide.
Autocrative Versus Democratic Decision Making: The "Executive Game" as an Experiment
No full text"The EXECUTIVE GAME (Henshaw & Jackson, 1966) is a computerized simulation of a manufacturing firm (one product) where players are required to make a series of decisions on the price of a product, marketing costs, production level, research and development expenses, plant investment, and dividends in a dynamic and competitive business situation. Total time represented is two years of operations, with each decision representing one quarter of a year. Nine firms constitute the “industry” and computer printouts provide both industry and company data in the form of operating and financial statements, to include a Profit and Loss statement, Cash Flow, and a Balance Sheet. While simple in comparison to an actual firm, the game appears to provide a relatively complex task suitable for experimental use in the study of variables related to small group and management research.
Evolution and Flexibility in Business Gaming
No full text"Two of the many aspects of business gaming brought out by this conference are: 1. The evolution of business gaming 2. The state of the art of flexibility in business games
Growing Emphasis on Implementation
No full text"One of the most notable aspects of this conference was the degree of involvement of the participants. At almost every session there was a lot of discussion by people who were not only interested in the subject matter of the presentations but were knowledgeable about the topics being presented as the result of similar activities of their own. The result was an extremely valuable professional interchange on the development and use of business simulations and other approaches to experiential learning. The discussions which interested me the most were the ones devoted to the implementation of simulations and related teaching methods. Most of these discussions indicated that even among designers of business games emphasis is shifting from the problems of design to the problems of implementation. The following topics received considerable attention in the sessions I attended: (1) the need to generate and maintain student involvement; (2) the need for instructor involvement; (3) the desire- ability of augmenting the business game with related projects; (4) the problem of evaluation; and (5) strategies for handling increased complexity in simulation games. Discussions of each of these will be very briefly summarized.