Abstract:

Increasing globalization leads to international teams having different cultures and values. This requires intercultural education and training. TeCuVa is a serious game based on the cocktail party game by Daphne Jameson, which focusses on hospitality manager, and Gabriele Hoeborn (2012) develops it further on. The authors developed this management and role-play-game especially for university education in engineering degree courses at bachelor and master level. TeCuVa as a role-play-game and a business game at the same time and it offers the experience and training of decision-making and co-operation processes in extremely different cultural groups. The game helps to reduce cultural barriers by creating an intercultural simulation of an engineering kick-off meeting. Discussions about (invisible) cultural differences introduce, while previous lectures, into the impact and importance of cultural values and intercultural communication. Within the simulation itself, the students play roles of different company members. Each company represents a different fictional culture including fictional values. The simulation starts as a kick-off meeting that opens a series of important business meetings concerning a joint venture industry project. The students practice to establish business relationships. However, the different cultures lead to high barriers to establish any relationship. The students get the information of their fictive cultural background. They train this cultural behavior within their group without any further information about the other fictive cultures. The decision-making is a very great challenge for the students, to decide who adapts to whom and how, and it is probably the greatest challenge in intercultural interactions at all. The authors carried out case studies to observe and evaluate the influence of gender and cultural background on the students’ attitudes toward this game and on the learning output as well.

Keywords:

Serious games, engineering education, intercultural training.