Business Simulation Games – A new tool in Management Education

Management education is all about looking beyond books. Conceptual knowledge is still vital but it is not all. The very concepts of management have been developed by observing and studying generations of successful managerial professionals so that the students of management can absorb the relevant qualities that can help them excel in their profession.

-What makes management education unique and sought after?

-What makes the management candidates command higher salaries as compared to other candidates?

The answer lies in the way management students learn. The process is highly practical oriented or experiential in nature. Most of the teaching tools adopt ‘Learning by Doing’ approach to enable the students to develop critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and innovation, leadership and team skills. One of these tools more increasingly used by many top business schools is Business Simulation Games.

What are Business Simulation Games?

Keys and Wolfe (1993) have defined a management game as a simplified simulated experimental environment that contains enough illusion of reality enabling real-world-like responses by those participating in the exercise. These games focus on simulating management or business processes and involve a series of decision-making exercises structured around a model of a business operation. The participants assume the role of managing the operation simulated in the game. They may be web-based and played online or downloadable and played offline. Now some such games are available in Apps also.

The simulation games come in two variations: single player or multi player. The single player game can be downloaded and played in desktop whereas the multi player games are played online by connecting to a central game server.

The educators can conduct business simulation exercises with the help of these games which are available almost at no cost. As most of the students have access to internet, these games can be made part of teaching many topics and skills. Some of the Massive Multi- Player Real time Online Games (MMOGs) are played by students through social media sites where they connect with other players.

Why Business Simulation Games?

 As these games expose the students to situations and challenges which they may encounter in real life, they are more engaging and effective as teaching tools.  Most of the outcomes of these games are:

• Decision making experience

• Better Learning outcomes

• Developing soft skills such as Communication Skills, Inter-Personal Skills, Negotiation skills, Team building Skills and creative thinking

• Developing product product/service knowledge, selling skills, customer service and more functional skills.

These games help rapid learning, give a practical orientation and can give the student wide exposure to many domains and aid in self discovery. There are plenty of free as well as priced business simulation games around. Here are some of the freely available games on the internet. However some of them have paid versions for academic use:

INNOV8

INNOV8 is an interactive, 3-D business simulator designed to teach the fundamentals of business process management and bridge the gap in understanding between business leaders and IT teams in an organization. It is developed by IBM and is available free of charge.

Sim Companies

The goal of the game is to create a profitable and competitive business. Each player receives a starting capital and few assets. Players' day-2-day tasks consist of managing the resource supply chain, from production to selling in retail, procuring business partners, ensuring financing, etc. 

Virtonomics:

Virtonomics is a series of multiplayer business simulation games consisting of Virtonomics Entrepreneur, Virtonomics Business War and Virtonomics Tycoon. In the Virtonomics series, there are no predefined rules to winning or losing, and the game does not end. Although users choose their own goals in the game, the most common goal is to build a successful business in a competitive society.

Stock Market Games:

There are a number of stock market simulation games offered for free by trading platforms. ‘MoneyBhai’,  ‘Wall Street Survivor ‘ , ‘HowTheMarketWorks’  ’Virtual Trading by ICICI Direct’ and more where a player gets knowledge of the functioning of stock market and also the mechanics on investing.

Author

Dr. Swarnalata Philip is head of Department of Management in JDCOEM. She has served in a nationalized bank for eighteen years and has a teaching experience of fourteen years. Her areas of interest include Corporate Finance, Equity and Derivative Market and Behavioral Finance. She is also interested in creative writing and has written many newspaper articles and poems.

Career options in Civil Engineering

Basically, Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewerage systems, pipelines, structural components of buildings, and railways etc. Anyone can think of career development in the field of civil engineering. Civil Engineering, as a degree, covers a lot of ground when it comes to understanding our surroundings and how to work with it, but, in the future, you will have to settle on a specialization and follow it.

Some of the most popular careers that wait for you after you graduate are:

1.      Construction managers

 Construction managers are the bosses of the working sites. With knowledge on the most basic things, like weather, costs, team and time management, managers have to be the eyes and ears of the person who hired them, and have to see that everything works smoothly.
 

2.     Geotechnical engineer

 Geotechnicians have to be on the lookout for everything nature-related and know how to manage waste disposal, flood control, when and where to build a dam or a bridge, and so on. And, once you get the hang of it, then, you will be the best.
 

3.     Environmental engineer

 Environmental engineers are the closest we have to superheroes, as they take care of the planet and allow us to keep living here (or simply living, which is nice). You will get to go and restore landscapes and nature from what other people ruin, you will get to explain to other people what a healthy indoor and outdoor environment is, and what to do in the future to stop wrecking our planet.

 

4.     Public Health Engineer

Controlling the water supply and sewage system, you take care of people in towns and villages, making sure the water is clean and pollution-free is what a Public Health Engineer looks after.
 

5.     Transportation Engineer

 Do you think public transportation just happens? All those subways, trams, roads, highways, and such don’t just spring from nowhere: top transportation engineers are there, taking care of us to get home on time or not wait in the rain for your bus, like the most tragic figure from literature.

 

6.     Urban planning engineer

 Urban planning might be the closest thing to playing with your childhood legos that you can get: deciding where to put a building, where a road should be, how to circle a park with a fence, how not to put a school next to a prison, and so on.
and many more.

 

About Author

Prof. Abdul Ghaffar Noor Mohammad is working as an Assistant Professor and HoD Civil Engineering Department at JDCOEM, Nagpur. He has more than 15 years of teaching experience. His areas of interest are Structural Concrete, Structural Design, Solid Mechanics, and Mechanics of Rigid Bodies etc. Apart from teaching, he is also interested in social and educational activities for 360 degree development of students.