An Evaluation of a Business Game in an MBA Curriculum

Abstract

T HIS article aims to provide evidence that a business game is a more effective method of teaching some aspects of planning than is a series of cases. The author describes an evaluation of the use of a business game as an adjunct to a case course by means of a comparative experiment with two graduate-level classes in production management. One might ask: Why seek experimental evidence of the effect of one pedagogic method when few other teaching methods have been explicitly evaluated? One reason is to gain acceptance within established curriculums that have been developed slowly by experience and proved by the quality of their graduates. Perhaps of greater importance, however, is the surprisingly rapid growth of the the use of games in management training in spite of the substantial resources required to develop a meaningful executive decision game. A recent article, for example, noted more than twenty-one different games in use as part of business curriculums, with more to be added in the future.' The amount of professional time such devices can absorb is exemplified by Cohen and colleagues, who has each spent from a third to all of their time during academic sessions over the past four or five years developing the Carnegie Game. Granted that this game is the most elegant in operation; nevertheless, even the development of such a relative straightforward model as the UCLA No. 3 game required more than three man-months' time of a professor, a programmer, and two research engineers. Until now, this commitment to develop games has been based upon the intuitive feelings of game advocates derived from the dynamic and flexible characteristics that the game or decision simulation possesses. This paper attempts to provide some experimental results to support this intuitive feeling as to the usefulness of gaming as a teaching device. In addition, a description of the game is provided to demonstrate how and where in the curriculum such an expensive methodology might be utilized. Finally, it should be noted that the game session was introduced and evaluated in an ongoing teaching situation where the learning potential of a given amount of available students' time is the main criterion. The pedagogical reasons for using a game in the production management course at the Harvard Business School were to provide production-planning decision experience and to demonstrate the interdependency of functional decisions within a firm. The game was used to stress the dimension of time in planning and to provide a realistic problem that would give the students some feedback to evaluate their own development. The UCLA Model No. 3 game was considered * Assistant professor of business administration, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.

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