Game—The Zu Zitter Game: A Course-Long Tool for Teaching Operations Management

Abstract

The mix of quantitative and qualitative material covered in most introductory operations management (OM) courses proves particularly challenging for many business majors and MBA students as well as for their instructors. Additionally, students with less work experience may struggle to see how topics such as process design and layout, capacity planning, quality management and control, inventory management, process improvement, and lean principles are integrated in a “big picture” way when applied in practice. In this paper, I describe the Zu Zitter Game, which places student teams in charge of all aspects of a production process and encourages them to actively integrate new material as the course progresses. It culminates in a fun, hands-on experiential learning “game day” event that brings the concepts taught in the course together and illustrates how they must be managed cohesively. Students’ feedback has been very positive; in particular, they rate it very highly for improving their “big picture” understanding of OM topics. Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.

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