Abstract:

We noticed that students using business game in each year become more creative compared with students who used business game only one or two times per study program. Longitudal use of business game allow students to understand IT more deeply and encourage our students’ to design new business game by themselves.

The research was performed with Business administration bachelor students of Kaunas University of Technology. They entered university four years ago.

For research the internet based business game Hard Nut was used in 4 modules:
• Introduction to Business (first year);
• Information Systems and Social Data Analysis (second year);
• Business GIS (third year);
• Simulation of business processes (forth year).

In the first year the students get just the panoramic view of business modeling and do not concern themselves with technologies. During debriefings they use basic tools of MS Excel and pre-prepared software for financial ratios.

In the second year the attention is turned towards databases. Students learn to create queries useful for business decision-making. That contrasts with conventional method when the students just do lab assignments without understanding their usefulness in business. Thus the students not only learn about finance and economics, possibilities of DBMS, but also understand the usefulness of queries.

In the third year the students learn about data visualization, GIS (the database is supplemented with data about localization). Thus the students get the opportunity to remember the databases and to study the GIS and their uses.

In the fourth year the students get acquainted with theoretical aspects of modeling and business games, try out different software packages meant for modeling, investigate the internals of BG “Hard Nut”. In the end of the semester the students had to separate into groups and to create a scenario for a business game. They could choose both business type and scenario type (mostly a game or mostly a simulation).
At first some students felt that the task might be too hard, but ultimately it proved to be interesting and achievable.

After the last period of such studies the students were asked to answer a survey. Survey questions were mostly about students’ views concerning the described study organization and creativity improvements.

Our experience show that longitudinal using of Business Game is related with increasing creativity of our students.

Keywords:

Business Game, education, ICT, GIS, Simulation.