Deploying Serious Games for Management in Higher Education: lessons learned and good practices

Abstract

Deployment of serious games (SGs) and their insertion in higher education (HE) curricula is still low. The lacks papers describing deployment of SGs in HE critically showing educational benefits and providing guidelines and good practices for their use. With the present work, we intend to make a first step in this direction, by reporting our experience in using state of the art managerial SGs in MSc engineering/business courses in four different European universities. In order to describe and analyse the educational characteristics and effectiveness of each game, we propose to use two models that we have straightforwardly extracted from two major pedagogical paradigms: the Bloom’s revised cognitive learning goals taxonomy and the Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. Based on our experience, we also propose a set of lessons and good practices to incentivize and better support deployment of SGs in HE courses.

Keywords

• Serious games
• deployment in higher education
• Bloom’s taxonomy
• Kolb’s learning cycle