Constructing Mini-Courses to Supplement Business Simulations

Abstract

"The potential for using business simulations to teach accounting and financial techniques and analysis has barely been tapped. In the early years of the development of business simulations, the primary objective was often to demonstrate the capabilities of the computer rather than to teach business management skills and techniques. In the early years and to a large extent now, participation in simulations has been on the basis of following hunches and trying to outguess the computer program. As long as simulations are carried out on this basis it is doubtful that they are worth the cost of the computer program time that it takes to score them. The real worth of business simulation is in learning to analyze data and using such analysis as the basis for simulation decision-making. One way to encourage this kind of approach to participation in a business simulation is to judge simulation participants partially on the techniques and procedures that they used in arriving at decisions. In a good simulation there will usually be a close relationship between the sophistication of the analysis used and the overall game results, however since the number of decisions in a given simulation are usually limited, the cream may not always have time to rise to the top."