This has been my best and most interesting business class I have taken my entire college career.
I have never felt like I did so well in any of my other classes.
Melissa Martin, Student, Bryant College, Smithfield, RI
Why use simulations?
Have your students play a game while they are hard at study. They will love your class.
Interesting lectures, hands-on lab sessions and relevant case studies are the necessary elements of a well designed business course curriculum. But isn't this mix missing one essential ingredient? What is the one thing that most college classes can't provide?
Experience.
Business simulations allow students to apply the newly acquired theoretical knowledge in a simulated business world. They gain hands-on managerial experience by running their own business. They experiment with strategies and compete with other companies. As the students make realistic business decisions and analyze the results of their actions, the important business principles become a part of their natural thinking.
Business Simulations: The Next Step in Management Training
by Ernest R. Cadotte
Rather then make strategic mistakes in real world and risk losing millions of dollars, students test their skills in a safe virtual business environment. Other benefits of simulation-based learning include:
Motivation. The game environment
stimulates the competitive spirit. Students focus on outsmarting
the classmates in a friendly game and the competitiveness drives the learning.
Learning occurs as a necessity to master the exercise and perform
better than the other teams.
Knowledge retention. Research shows
that students remember only about 20% of what we tell them in
the classroom. But when they learn by doing, they retain 80%
of the knowledge. When students make realistic business decisions
in a simulation and immediately see the results of their actions,
the important business principles will become a part of their
natural thinking.
Excitement. Shouldn't learning be
as much fun as playing a game? Business games allow you to put
your students in charge of a marketing division or an entire
corporation. Students get to test their skills in a fun interactive
game and they become totally immersed in the learning process.
The strategy business game environment entices students and
adds a whole new level of excitement to the classroom.
