Decision-Making, Information Seeking, and Compromise: A Simulation Game Activity in Global Industrial Management

Abstract

John Morelock is a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech. His research interests include student motivation, game-based learning, and gamified classrooms. He received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to study how engineering instructors use digital games, and how these teaching methods affect student motivation. In undergraduate engineering education, students are often overexposed to problem-solving methods that are unrepresentative of how problems are solved in engineering practice. For decision-making problems in particular, students are commonly taught to compare alternative solutions using information that is known and provided. However, many real-world decisionmaking problems require a broader range of problem-solving strategies, including information seeking, extrapolation of a decision's consequences, and compromise between parties with competing objectives. Accordingly, this paper describes a simulation game activity designed to offer industrial engineering seniors experience in solving realistic decision-making problems. The simulation game involved students working in teams that role-played as different types of companies in a global smartphone market, where teams needed to negotiate with one another to establish profitable contracts within the game's ruleset. In accordance with our learning objectives, we qualitatively examined how students sought information, adapted to changing conditions, and made decisions informed by constraints. Particularly, we sought to identify learning frameworks that fit the data well and would help us improve the design and assessment of the activity in later iterations. We found that the learning frameworks of metacognition and discrepancy resolution combined to explain most student activity relative to our learning objectives, and these frameworks suggest several points of improvement for the design and assessment of the simulation game.

Monetizing Life May Be the Ethical Thing to Do

“…Therefore, deciding the reliability of a system is among the tasks engineers do in their profession. Note however, that engineering students are not accustomed to this type of problems [48]. Traditionally, engineering students are tasked to calculate the reliability of a system given some data set.…”

Reality Gaps in Industrial Engineering Senior Design or Capstone Projects

“…We share the experience that "exposing senior engineering students to problems that resemble the ambiguity and social characteristics of engineering practice reveals student difficulties in bounding, coping, and navigating through the ambiguity of problem definition" [8]. We also share the belief that, "while engineers will eventually acclimate to this context during their early careers as practitioners, … engineering education can be adapted to help our students gain those skills as they learn traditional concepts, theories, and analytical methods" [8].…”

A Gamification Approach for Experiential Education of Inventory Control

“…However, the motivation to develop a serious game needs to be supported with the sufficient evidence that the learning requirements can be at least equally satisfied compared to a traditional lecture setting [6]. Educational games used for various courses in Industrial Engineering curricula such as lean manufacturing and six sigma [8][9] [10]; operations management [11] [12], [13] [14].…”

“…Several suggestions to improve the game's effectiveness on learning are proposed but not evaluated. Furthermore, a simulation-based learning activity in global industrial management is developed [13]. The researchers used the simulation-based game to understand how students seek information adapt to changing conditions and make informed decisions accordingly.…”