A plug and play pathway approach for operations management games development

Abstract

Many researchers have advocated the use of games (and simulations) to enhance students’ learning. Research has shown that in order to promote a deeper understanding of material, students ought to be engaged with what they are doing. However, there are limited interactive games for classroom teaching, especially within the operations management subject area. In light of this, this paper proposes the development of a plug and play interactive game pathway to enhance students learning.

The proposed game pathway would provide four advantages to support learning: (a) making knowledge accessible; (b) making thinking visible; (c) making learning fun; and (d) promoting autonomous learning. The benefit of a plug and play (PnP) platform is that it allows future games to be added to suit various students’ level. This paper reports the experiment results and discusses the implications of this study on classroom teaching.

Introduction

The operations management field covers a wide range of subjects from specific areas such as inventory and scheduling, to much broader interrelated areas such as lean and supply chain management. Table 1 briefly shows the subject areas under operations management (OM). It is generally understood that, to teach effectively, each of these subject areas should apply different teaching approaches, given the differences in scope and content. Moreover, it is particular important that an OM taught course can represent some ways for students to directly gain experience in industrial management practice. For example, inventory subject which involves more quantitative modelling is best taught through simulation or tutorials; whereas, supply chain or lean management could be best taught using case studies and games, in addition to the traditional lectures.

Using simulation games to complement traditional lectures for enhancing students’ learning have been advocated by many researchers (Kiili, 2005, Tan, 2007). Games make students become more explicit about what they are doing, seeing, and hearing (Dill & Doppelt, 1963). Learning through games becomes an interactive way to deliver knowledge (Gosen and Washbush, 2004, Tompson and Dass, 2000). Students are pulled into the learning process and encouraged to participate through an interactive environment (Gosen and Washbush, 2004, Proserpio and Gioia, 2007, Randel et al., 1992, Zantow et al., 2005).

Due to the rapid development in networking technologies, web-based games have been developed in educational aspect (Kiili, 2005, Wang, 2008). There are studies which demonstrate that the use of computer games can improve thinking (Aliya, 2002, Virvou et al., 2005) and can create a new learning culture that corresponds better with students’ habits and interest (Prensky, 2001). Moreover, web-based games construct a sense of competition among students (Siddiqui, Khan, & Akhtar, 2008) and deliver a compelling experience is what wins, where the best combination of game play, learning methodology and “eye candy” is what is being sought (Prensky, 2001).

In the OM field, there are a number of simulation games, including computer or board games, such as beer game (Cantor & Macdonald, in press), Quality Dice Game, Buckingham JIT game (see Table 2) that are popular and widely adopted for teaching operations management concepts.

However, each of these games tends to focus on specific areas. For example, beer game is mainly used to illustrate the bullwhip effect but not for explaining the differences between push versus pull production system. A typical general OM module will involve twelve lectures, and usually includes all the subject areas listed in Table 1. Thus, to complement an OM module teaching with interactive learning approaches, an academic may need to have 7–8 different games. Moreover, there are three different levels of students, i.e. undergraduate, postgraduate and executives. All of them have different level of understanding in OM. Therefore, it may not be appropriate to use a same set of game materials for all level of students. Clearly, the issues faced by OM academics in using simulation gaming in classroom teaching are:

• Preparation time – preparation time to understand different simulation games may take up considerable chunk of an academic teaching time (Chang et al., 2003, Tan, 2007).

• Resources – having a handful of simulation games, either developed in-house or from commercial packages could amount to quite a significant cost that most departments may be unable to support (Damron, 2008).

• Level of knowledge – effort and time required to ‘tailor’ existing games to suit various students’ levels may be too complex for academics to handle, even if they are familiar with the games (Peters and Vissers, 2004, Roberts, 1974).

There is a balance struck between the quality of teaching and cost/time constraint, the number of simulation games required for an OM course and how to customise various OM games to match students’ levels? (King, 1973, Thavikulwat, 2004, Thiagarajan and Pasigna, 1985). Having the flexibility to use the same set of simulation games to teach various students’ levels, as well as reducing preparation time and costs would be beneficial to academics. For example, having the same set of simulation games to illustrate various OM elements which can be used for different students from undergraduate to executives would be useful to academics. It will significantly reduce the resource requirements and preparation time (a single game versus many games) (Damron, 2008).

In light of this, this paper proposes the development of a plug and play (PnP) based interactive classroom game to enhance students learning. A PnP platform allows existing games to be expanded or customised to meet various teaching requirements. In the long term, the proposed PnP game would provide virtual environments that allow students to explore beyond boundaries of given material, and encourage students to become a self-reliant learner (Dede, 2004). The aim is to eliminate the learning and resource overheads required to run different simulation games. The proposed PnP concept is not about relying on software’s properties to configure game play (Thavikulwat, 2004). Rather it is about scalability in game design, providing a platform to allow games to be configured to meet different teaching needs.

This paper reports the experiment results and discusses the implications of this study on classroom teaching. The paper has 3 sections. Firstly, the PnP concept is explained. Then, the game pathway and research methodology are described. Finally, preliminary results in using the PnP games in classroom teaching are discussed and future works explained.