Simulation & Gaming

Fear of emotions inhibits the spread of games and simulations. This fear also damages the design, briefing, running, and debriefing. Emotions and reasons are not poles apart. Emotions are not irrational, and they have a history in a person’s thoughts, experiences, and values. They do not arise out of nothing. Emotions are what make us human. They are extremely varied. Instead of being feared, they should be welcomed and discussed in both the briefing and debriefing.

This description explores a form of experiential learning using specific outdoor learning activities in a higher education setting to introduce participants to each other and to build a team in a leadership program. Participants in the Leadership Enhancement and Development Program(LEAD) created at the University of West Florida (UWF) include both faculty and staff members.

This article reviews how and why the authors have used the cross-cultural simulation BAFA BAFA in a 1styear social sciences inquiry course on social identity. The article discusses modifications made to Shirts’s original script for BAFA BAFA, how the authors conduct the postsimulation debriefing, key aspects of the student-written reflection of the simulation, and research results on how students perceive and rate BAFA BAFA relative to their learning. Students enrolled in the course find the simulation to be important to various aspects of their learning, including helping them to understand cultural diversity. This is particularly true for students who score highly on measures of deep learning, that is, the ability to connect course content with meanings in other situations and experiences in reflective ways.

This article argues that the merger of simulations and problem-based learning (PBL) can enhance both active-learning strategies. Simulations benefit by using a PBL framework to promote student-directed learning and problem-solving skills to explain a simulated dilemma with multiple solutions. PBL benefits because simulations structure the information students receive to focus learning on the intended curriculum and increase the strategy’s effectiveness in a wider variety of venues. A combined strategy—a PBL simulation— places its simulation at the forefront of learning and helps students and teachers sift through the overwhelming complexity that can arise in a more pure PBL. The authors illustrate the strength of a PBL simulation with an economics unit on trade, titled THE GREAT AWAKENING.

Russon and Chang simulated St. Petersburg games and found that their results were inconsistent with their theoretical predictions. In this article, the theoretical outcomes are derived this time using the methodology suggested by Daniel Bernoulli, and games are then simulated. When this is done, it is found that the theoretical and empirical results are consistent.

The TAKEOVER TRIO is a business game about a takeover. Three stakeholders (mother company, ailing daughter company, and potential buying company) must agree on a plan to prevent compulsory liquidation of the daughter. The primary learning objective is to make participantsaware of the effect of negotiation process parameters on its outcome. Depending on the facilitator’s aims, he or she could highlight either or all of the following process parameters: logical thinking, creativity, dominance, or process management. The game scenario is not based on a real-life case (all data are fictional) but has been devised to balance three stakeholders to prevent an obvious outcome. It takes at least 12 people to play and 3 hours, plus about an hour of preparations for each participant.

Over the last several decades many systematic management approaches, such as Total Quality Management, aimed at improving organizational performance and employee satisfaction have captured organizations’attention. Given their origins in statistics, operations management, and engineering, many of the concepts and techniques are technical. When first introduced to these methods, students become lost in their complexity and lose interest. This exercise was designed to provide students a simple way to experience firsthand the power of process improvement so that, once their interest was stimulated, they would explore advanced methods.