AN ONLINE GAME FOR TEACHING BUSINESS

MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS

Pedro Campos

CCM – University of Madeira and INESC ID Lisbon, Campus Universitário da Penteada, 9000-390 Funchal, Portugal

Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction, Games, Interaction Design, Business Management, User-centered Design.

Abstract: In this paper, we describe the result of a multi-disciplinary approach to designing a particular class of educa-

tional games: business management games. The approach was based on intensive collaboration and co-

design meetings with business management researchers. The result was a Web-based game called “Sim-

Company”, aimed at teaching children about business management concepts, thus promoting an entrepre-

neurship culture in classroom settings and beyond. “SimCompany” proved effective as a teaching tool about

business management concepts, and initial evaluation showed a positive increase in students’ rate of learn-

ing, compared to traditional teaching methods.

1 INTRODUCTION

The power of games as learning instruments has

become unquestionable. Our students have changed

radically and today’s students are no longer the peo-

ple our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students represent the first generation to

grow up with the new digital technology, having

spent their en-tire lives surrounded by and using

computers, videogames, digital music players, video

cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of

the digital age. Today’s average college grads have

spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but

over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to men-

tion 20,000 hours watching TV). This is one out of

many reasons why both researchers and practitioners

have started to embrace games as educational tools,

as opposed to the traditional vision of games as

merely entertainment instruments.

In this paper, we describe “SimCompany”, a fun,

educational game designed to instill the

entrepreneurship spirit in children (9-14 years old).

As the young player progresses in the game, the

basic concepts of consumer behavior, marketing and

strategic management are described, illustrated and

reinforced in a fun, easy and engaging way.

The goal of the game is to reach the last level

and complete it with the greatest amount of points

accumulated and before time expires. As an

example, we provide a brief description of four

levels of this game, taken from the game’s script,

which was outlined through a multidisciplinary

design approach involving designers, programmers,

user interface experts and - most importantly -

entrepreneurship and management experts.

2 BACKGROUND

Some authors observed that computer games have

achieved their massive reach without going through

the education system. While games may be an ideal

companion to classroom instruction, they do not

have to go through the classroom to access students.

Other educational reforms depend on the teacher as

the medium and do not necessarily take into account

the many demands and constraints already faced by

educators. Video games give teachers and parents

the ability to reach students where they live, bypass-

ing many of the challenges associated with restruc-

turing the education system from the inside out.

2.1 Games for Learning

Using games as an educational tool is not a novel

approach. Their true potential emerged from the fact

that 50 to 60 percent of all Americans play games

and the typical game players are relatively young

computer users (Kafai, 1995). Particularly popular

games include the simulation genre, e.g. The Sims

and SimCity, which allow players to create and

231

Campos P. (2010).

AN ONLINE GAME FOR TEACHING BUSINESS MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Human-Computer Interaction, pages 231-237

DOI: 10.5220/0002959502310237

 SciTePress

manage simulated communities and worlds. Spore is

another title aimed at simulating evolutionary adap-

tation (Maxis, 2006).

Games have also been used for serious purposes.

Early examples include games that promote health

behaviour change and management for children,

such as Packy and Marlon, and adventure game for

children to learn about diabetes self management

skills, and Rex Ronin, a smoking prevention video

game. Games have also proven effective in teaching

children a foreign language (Baltra, 1990).

Serious games have also been developed for

adults to train personnel in a variety of areas. Exam-

ples include Visual Purple’s Angel Five, modelling a

weapons of mass destruction terrorist attack with the

trainee coordinating resources between federal, state,

and local agencies; BreakAway’s Incident Com-

mander trains first responders and federal employees

in the new National Incident Management System

for standardized response methods dealing with ter-

rorist attacks or natural disasters; and Tactical Iraqi

which uses artificial intelligence and computer gam-

ing techniques to make learning languages quicker,

more effective, and fun for military personnel.

In terms of games related to business concepts,

which form the core of this chapter, researchers as

well as industrial practitioners have made several

attempts to create entertaining forms of educating

business concepts. For instance Zhou and colleagues

(2008) describe and demonstrate an Internet based

supply chain simulation game. The innovation pre-

sented in this game stems from a comprehensive set

of supply chain (SC) management strategies which

can be tested in the game. The key functionalities of

the game were designed to increase players’ SC

awareness, facilitate understanding on various SC

strategies and challenges, foster collaboration be-

tween partners, and improve problem-solving skills.

The authors concluded that such a game could be

used as an efficient and effective teaching tool as

well as a research tool in operations research and

management science. They also observed problems

and obstacles detected while engaging in the SC

business scenario game. Actions were proposed and

implemented to solve these problems, which resulted

in improved SC performance.

Another example very close to the spirit of Sim-

Company is Disney’s game Hot Shot Business

(Everett, 2003), a simulation game designed to teach

basic business concepts and encourage entrepreneur-

ship. The authors emphasized the importance of play

testing, with tight cycles of design-and-evaluate ses-

sions, which were crucial to the game’s success and

to the development process itself.

It is also well known that one appealing way to

motivate children to learn using technology is to

apply games, which are well known, exploiting the

power of popular TV shows. With the goal of mini-

mizing the amount of effort and requirements to set

up a situated learning environment, Lin (2007) inte-

grated scenarios of the popular video game Pokemon

in classroom education of 2nd grade math concepts.

Observations showed that, in such arrangement, they

could engage some students into the scenarios where

math is applied. Since most children inevitably

spend much time playing digital games, it is argued

that digital game-based learning is one way to in-

volve kids to do the right things with computer (Lin,

2007). Lee et al. (2004) performed a study to inves-

tigate whether educational video games could be

integrated into a classroom with positive effects for

the teacher and students. They conducted the study

with 39 2nd grade students using their mathematic

drill software “Skills Arena” (Lee et al., 2004). Early

data from the study suggested that not only do

teachers and students enjoy using “Skills Arena”,

students even exceeded expectations by doing three

times more math problems in 19 days than they

would have using traditional worksheets. Regardless

of the popularity that games exhibit when it comes

to teaching children, there is a lack of research to-

wards design approaches that can prove useful when

conceiving and designing such games.

2.2 Conceptualizing the Educational

Game Experience

Papert (1996) refers that “learning is more effective

when the apprentice voluntarily engages in the proc-

ess” (Papert, 1996, p. 43). The best learning experi-

ences are the ones that “motivate and are pleasur-

able” (p. 43). Motivating the learners is therefore a

crucial factor to increase the possibility of action and

discovery, which in turn increases the capacity of

what some researchers call learning to learn.

In this sense, the novel constructionist-learning

paradigm aims to adapt and prepare tomorrow’s

schools to the constant challenges faced by a society,

which is currently embracing and accelerating pace

of profound changes.

The contact kids have with computers today is a

fascinating experience, as anyone can easily attest

by simply speaking to any of those children, ques-

tioning them about their computer usage experi-

ences. The computer represents the possibility of

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occupying their time with activities that allow them

to learn about many issues. But it’s also an explora-

tion and play space where children can challenge the

logic, feeling they possess magical powers, and

where they feel that the decisions they take have an

effective immediate impact over the actions, thus

determining the flow of events.

Vygotsky’s (1978) social cognition learning

model asserts that culture is the prime determinant

of individual development. Humans are the only

species to have created culture, and every human

child develops in the context of a culture. Therefore,

a child’s learning development is affected in ways

large and small by the culture–including the culture

of family environment – in which he or she is en-

meshed.

In this context, the creation of collaborative

learning groups, which bring together children with

different learning levels, can prove useful. Currently,

public schools have ever-larger numbers of students

per classroom, with more diverse backgrounds. This

poses some difficulty to attending every student’s

individual needs. One possible solution lies in meth-

ods employed by the students themselves, i.e. stu-

dents learn and teach each other, collaboratively.

This kind of learning, called peer-mediated instruc-

tion (Campbell et al., 1991), is an alternative class-

room arrangement in which students take an instruc-

tional role with classmates or other students. Many

approaches have been developed in which students

work in pairs or small cooperative learning groups.

To be most effective, students must be taught roles

in the instructional episode; to be systematic, elicit

responses, and provide feedback. Research supports

the use of these approaches as alternative practice

activities, however, does not condone the use of

peers for providing instruction in “new” instruc-

tional content.

Gardner (1983) centred his investigations on

multiple intelligences and the implication they have

on educational practices. Garner suggested the IQ-

tests notion of intelligence is too limited and pro-

posed eight different kinds of intelligence (Gardner,

1983). The important issue, according to Gardner, is

not the number of different intelligences we have,

but the actual development of all of them, according

to our skills. Despite being anatomically separated

from each other, Gardner declares the several intel-

ligences rarely work independently. They are com-

petitors but complement each other. We all possess

the same intelligences but not in the same way or

same proportions (Gardner, 1983).

Scholar learning requires the student to deeply

understand the subjects. Gardner advocates one of

the best ways to accomplish this deep understanding

is to approach the same subject through different

entry points (music, language, spatial, etc.). There-

fore, we should use an approach that covers not only

the specific field of the subject at matter, but also

other fields. This multidisciplinary approach Gard-

ner recommends to schools is a better way to trans-

fer knowledge.

If the child doesn’t understand through the intel-

ligence we elected to inform her, then the teacher

can consider there are other different intelligences to

explore. Based on this approach, our research that

employs augmented reality and a physical user inter-

face, allows a deeper understanding of the learning

experience, using one of those multiple entry points.

3 DESIGNING SimCompany

There are several user-centred design approaches to

designing interactive systems, such as the ones de-

scribed in, e.g. (Dix et al., 2004). When it comes to

game design, however, we verify that the process is

largely driven by actual practice. Academic re-

searchers have mainly focused on the theoretical

issues regarding the game design process, and the

practitioners’ concerns are very different from the

researchers’. Therefore, there is a tendency to work

in isolation.

While many performance arts such as screen-

writing, acting, filmmaking and cinematography

have produced theories to explain and direct creative

processes, game design is still in its relative begin-

ning and there aren’t yet many theories about its

process.

During the design of the game SimCompany, we

followed an approach inspired by the best practices

in user-centred design, but along the specific lines of

human-work interaction design (Clemmensen et al.,

2005). This lead to a novel multidisciplinary ap-

proach we found particularly useful when designing

business management games.

The main actors involved in such an approach are:

• Interaction and visual designers;

• Computer programmers;

• Human-Computer Interaction researchers;

• Business Managers;

• Entrepreneurship academic researchers;

• Children (the end-users).

AN ONLINE GAME FOR TEACHING BUSINESS MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS

233

Figure 1: Overall look of the game “SimCompany” at its first level.

However, simply joining these different-

background, different-age actors into a single meet-

ings room is obviously not enough to guarantee that

a successful game is created. What we propose is a

multi-disciplinary approach that focuses the game’s

design and implementation on the actual learning

goals that are desired. By centring the whole game

project on the actual work performed by real busi-

ness managers, the gaming experience will become

particularly educational, since players will be faced

with game decisions very close to the core of a busi-

ness manager’s everyday tasks and decisions.

3.1 Design Approach

The approach we followed was based on analyzing

the work that managers do when conducting their

business and from that point we established a crea-

tive game script aimed at engaging children but also

making them learn the day-to-day real work of a

businessman. The approach followed for each of the

game’s levels was divided into three stages: (i) cog-

nitive analysis, (ii) definition of learning objectives

and (iii) translation into a game script.

Stage (i) was directly concerned with outlining

the kind of decisions that are made by business man-

agers and entrepreneurs, when leading their opera-

tions. Stage (ii) focused on the learning objectives,

which were derived after consulting with different

business managing experts in the field and also ac-

cording to some interviews with business leaders

and general research literature on the subject. The

final stage, translation into a game script, was fo-

cused on writing a compelling script that children

would enjoy. At the same time, the script would

need to meet the learning objectives stated during

stage (ii). The final game script document served as

a game design document and formed the basis for

the user interface design of the game.

3.2 SimCompany, the Game

“SimCompany” is a fun game designed to instil in

children (9-14 years old) the entrepreneurship spirit.

As the young player progresses in the game, the ba-

sic concepts of consumer behaviour, marketing and

strategic management are described, illustrated and

reinforced in a fun, easy and engaging way.

The goal of the game is to reach the last level

and complete it with the greatest amount of points

accumulated and before time expires. As an exam-

ple, we provide a brief description of three levels of

this game, taken from the game’s script, which was

outlined through a human-work design approach.

Some of the game’s levels are described in the fol-

lowing paragraphs.

Level 1: Getting to know the Consumer. At the

first level, the young player will be faced with a roll

of different people (consumers). Based on the de-

scription of these characters (age, sex, social class,

profession, interests, etc.), the player will have to

associate the various products that appear onscreen

(e.g. skateboards, neckties, candies, etc.) to the most

likely consumer. Figure 1 illustrates this level’s user

interface.

The learning objective is to show the player that

there are various factors (demographic, geographic,

personal tastes, lifestyle, etc.) that determine the

choices of consumption, the ways that each person

chooses to spend time and money and that should be

taken into account when attempting to open the right

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business. To move to the next level, the player must

accumulate a minimum number of points directly

related to the number of correct associations made

between consumer-product.

Level 3: Knowing the Consumer – Part 3. At level

3, the consumer’s needs change and the player must

figure out the best way to deal with these changes.

He will have to define the product’s characteristics

that meet the consumer’s needs and set prices. Ad-

vice will be given to the player so that he can change

the course of business in light of new information…

Depending on the decisions the player makes, he

will be able to gather a number of points which may

or may not ensure his transition to the next level.

The learning objective, once again, is to demon-

strate that the knowledge of the consumer is essen-

tial to anticipate and respond to changes in its

needs/expectations. One must always be alert!

Level 9: Competition. At this level, the competition

increases… New organizations start to emerge,

which are direct competitors… To worsen the situa-

tion there is also an increase on the number of sub-

stitute products. The player must be able to identify

situations where the threat of substitutes and rivalry

in the industry increases and choose the scenario

where his/her organization will have better chances

to survive. The learning objective is to demonstrate

the importance of being aware of the threats of direct

competitors and substitute products for the survival

of the business.

Level 10: Let’s make a Trip! The Big Finale! The

business has been a success and now the player has

the opportunity to diversify it in geographic terms.

But, how? Several scenarios and advice will be

given and the player must use his incredible man-

agement abilities to internationalize his business in

the best possible manner... It will be a difficult task

but we know that he will make it...trying is all that

matters!

The learning objective of this level is to show

children, in very simple and captivating way, the

most basic concepts of internationalization of a

business.

In conclusion, the game SimCompany was co-

game de-signers, scriptwriters, business managers

and teachers, as well as HCI and Entrepreneurship

researchers. The final product is a set of levels each

with its own learning goals, and therefore with its

own game variables (points, money spent, etc.). By

putting the player in the central role of a business

manager, the game succeeds at conveying the learn-

ing issues in a “do-it yourself” manner.

4 EVALUATION

The evaluation of this game has been initially con-

ducted with two classes (children aged 9-11) at a

local school. Overall there were 28 females and 21

males. In both classes, participants were randomly

divided into two groups of equal dimension: a con-

trol group, composed of students who took a lesson

on managing a business using traditional methods –

blackboard, books and the lecture itself – and the

experimental group, composed of students who

played “SimCompany”. Each class was divided into

three phases: a pretest phase, when students an-

swered a random set of questions about the subject

being taught (management) without being taught

anything about it. Then came the learning phase it-

self. It consisted of a traditional lesson in the control

group and a “SimCompany” playing session, in the

experimental group.

At the end of the class, students performed a

similar posttest, so that we could quantify their aver-

age degree of learning obtained by each of the

groups. One way to measure the degree of learning

(how much the students knowledge improved) ob-

tained through a particular mode of education is

quantified by the <g> score (Mayo, 2007), which is

calculated the following way:

<g> = (posttest% - pretest%) / (100% - pre-

test%)

where posttest% is the percentage of correct an-

swers in the posttest and pretest% is the percentage

of correct answers in the pretest. The procedure for

the control groups was similar, except that the

teacher was asked to give the class about the exact

same subject but using traditional methods like the

white-board.

Table 1 shows the evolution from pre-tests to

post-tests for each of these groups of students. The

results refer to the pre and post-test percentage of

correct answers; the right-most column shows the

<g> value.

Table 1: Evolution of the students’ degree of learning <g>.

Pre-Tes

Pos

-Tes

<g>

Control

59.1 70.3 27%

Experimental

57.2 77.4 47%

AN ONLINE GAME FOR TEACHING BUSINESS MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS

235

From this initial evaluation, it became clear that

SimCompany is an effective game for teaching chil-

dren general business management concepts: results

showed a higher <g> value for the experimental

group than the control group. This is a step forward

in designing technology that really helps children

learn. Future work will include evaluating the game

in more schools and students, as well as outlining

general principles that can prove useful when de-

signing this kind of games. This will also contribute

to a growing body of knowledge based on human-

work interaction design.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The main goal of this research was to conceive a

new game that could promote the entrepreneurial

spirit in children. However, during that process we

ended up collecting a body of knowledge regarding

how business managers and teachers can act effec-

tively, during a UCD game design process.

It is now clear that as a result of the present

ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of

their interaction with it, today’s students think and

process information in a fundamentally different

way from their predecessors. In this context, com-

puter games have the potential to act as an effective

learning tool. Some of the reasons that show its po-

tential were analyzed through this research, and in-

clude the following:

• Scale: an online-based educational game can

reach a much higher number of students than tradi-

tional educational methods. Its effectiveness also

seems promising and shows positive improvements

on the students learning rates, although more re-

search is needed in order to correctly assess it.

• Availability: traditional educational lectures

only occur at a pre-fixed time point, whereas educa-

tional games can be played during the children’s

spare time at anytime. This is even more important if

we think about the percentage of students who own

smartphones, PDA’s and other computing devices

that can also be used as effective ubiquitous learning

tools.

There are reasons to believe that the business,

technological and social dimensions of games will

continue to be key driving factors of the gaming

billion-dollar industry. The process of creating those

games, however, is still far from being optimal. One

of the reasons for this is simply that professional

designers often don’t have one of the following

skills (although some have most of these and very

few have all the skills): (i) visual design skills; (ii)

programming and technical skills; (iii) knowledge of

the educational curriculum and contents – and ide-

ally they should all present these skills. However,

it’s more natural to simply bring different-

background persons to the project. Therefore, novel

design approaches are needed, especially those ap-

proaches which are capable of effectively bringing

together all these very different skills.

As for future work, there are certainly many ave-

nues of research on game design for educational

goals. Whichever design approach is followed, it is

essential to regard the game as an additional educa-

tional tool, rather than a solution for all problems. In

particular it would be very interesting to study how

can we design educational games that promote a

more collaborative style of learning. Putting students

interacting with each other would be particularly

useful for learning complex sets of concepts, such as

those present in the business management fields.

One of the most interesting success factors of educa-

tional games like SimCompany is related to its avail-

ability, as we mentioned previously. This opens up

the power of educational mobile games as another

promising field of research, since it could exploit

this factor to a further extent.

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