Growing Emphasis on Implementation

Abstract

"One of the most notable aspects of this conference was the degree of involvement of the participants. At almost every session there was a lot of discussion by people who were not only interested in the subject matter of the presentations but were knowledgeable about the topics being presented as the result of similar activities of their own. The result was an extremely valuable professional interchange on the development and use of business simulations and other approaches to experiential learning. The discussions which interested me the most were the ones devoted to the implementation of simulations and related teaching methods. Most of these discussions indicated that even among designers of business games emphasis is shifting from the problems of design to the problems of implementation. The following topics received considerable attention in the sessions I attended: (1) the need to generate and maintain student involvement; (2) the need for instructor involvement; (3) the desire- ability of augmenting the business game with related projects; (4) the problem of evaluation; and (5) strategies for handling increased complexity in simulation games. Discussions of each of these will be very briefly summarized."