CO-CREATING A BUSINESS SIMULATION GAME WITH STUDENTS

This article will discuss our approach in co-creating a Business Simulation Game (BSG) together with students in a Mechatronics & Business Management Master’s program. The goal of integrating students into the development process of the BSG is to ensure that the game is in line with the target group’s knowledge about the subject matter as well as their learning needs. Including students in the development process also allows developers to get immediate feedback and ideas for improvement on the game content, mechanics and design. For this purpose, students were involved in the game development process from the beginning and encouraged to come forward with their own ideas as well as to challenge the ideas of the project team (a group of university employees and researchers). Another expected beneficiary side-effect is to allow students to deepen their own understanding about the subject matter, as creating a BSG requires an in-depth study of the learning material. The paper will also address the special circumstances due to the coronavirus lockdown during the first testing phase of the BSG in spring 2020.