Abstract:

Business simulation games can be considered as an especially important teaching method as they are able to acquaint students with the real circumstances that they will encounter in their future business careers. In these games, students play the role of executive and, as such, make and apply business decisions and obtain the respective results, which will be used to make the next decision.

This tool, as part of the new technologies, develops most of the skills that students need to become effective executives: goal-setting, information-gathering, decision-making and responsibility-taking. Hence, business games offer a magnificent opportunity for teamwork to improve social relationships among players and develop their communication skills and personal enrichment by considering other people’s viewpoints, making them better prepared for what will be their routine work method in the future.

By using a statistical data reduction technique, an empirical model has been developed that demonstrates the obvious pedagogical effectiveness of business games as a didactic learning tool.

The results obtained in this research work confirm that there are many properties that a postgraduate MBA student values in a business game, and the conclusions reached demonstrate that these games are powerful didactic tools that enable university students to enhance their learning, improving their knowledge in the future.

Keywords:

Business simulator, decision making, training and entrepreneurial skills, pedagogical effectiveness, postgraduate courses, teaching method.