Do business games foster skills? A cross-cultural study from learners’ views

Purpose: This study seeks to analyse students’ perception of the effectiveness of business games as an e-learning method in management training. This analysis of games’ effectiveness is centred in the generic and managerial skills acquired, through the comparison of students’ opinions in different cultural contexts within Europe. Design/methodology: The analysis focuses on 120 management students at postgraduate level who use the same business game at different universities in five European countries: Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Germany. Findings: The results indicate that students positively assessed the generic and specific managerial skills fostered by the business game. The generic skills most valued were information and decision-making, and leadership. Regarding the specific skills, the most valued were management skills and the least valued, skills related to planning and the acquisition of theoretical knowledge. However, significant differences were found between students in different cultural contexts and education systems in the case of certain specific managerial skills. Practical implications: This finding suggests that the students’ perception of how a business game helps them acquire specific managerial skills is influenced by cultural aspects and previous exposure to experiential learning, which determine that the teachers’ role and the teaching process should be adapted to the students’ learning model. Originality/value: With this study, a better knowledge about the students’ perception of this e-learning method is obtained, not just considering a specific educational environment, but comparing opinions of students from different cultural contexts, which adds value to the analyses developed.Peer Reviewe

Equilibrium Selection Through Incomplete Information in Coordination Games: An Experimental Study

We perform an experiment on a pure coordination game with uncertainty about the payoffs. Our game is closely related to models that have been used in many macroeconomic and financial applications to solve problems of equilibrium indeterminacy. In our experiment, each subject receives a noisy signal about the true payoffs. This game (inspired by the “global” games of Carlsson and van Damme, Econometrica, 61, 989–1018, 1993) has a unique strategy profile that survives the iterative deletion of strictly dominated strategies (thus a unique Nash equilibrium). The equilibrium outcome coincides, on average, with the risk-dominant equilibrium outcome of the underlying coordination game. In the baseline game, the behavior of the subjects converges to the theoretical prediction after enough experience has been gained. The data (and the comments) suggest that this behavior can be explained by learning. To test this hypothesis, we use a different game with incomplete information, related to a complete information game where learning and prior experiments suggest a different behavior. Indeed, in the second treatment, the behavior did not converge to equilibrium within 50 periods in some of the sessions.We also run both games under complete information. The results are sufficiently similar between complete and incomplete information to suggest that risk-dominance is also an important part of the explanation.Publicad

Why Johnny Can't Fly: Treating Games as a Form of Youth Media Within a Youth Development Framework

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningIn this chapter, I use anecdotes and case studies from both work and personal experience to make an argument for treating games as a form of youth media and explore what this means for after-school youth programs. I talk about my son. I talk about a hotdog stand. I talk about two after school programs in which youth make or use games to engage with serious global issues. I explore the creation of Ayiti, a game about poverty in rural Haiti, and what it meant four youth of color to take part in its creation. I explore a teen program in the virtual world of Teen Second Life that created a maze to educate their peers about child sex trafficking. I discuss James Paul Gee's Situated Learning Matrix, the digital literacy theories of Henry Jenkins and the perspectives of other key thinkers in this volume and in the field to explore their implications for media literacy and youth development programs. The chapter concludes by talking about 21st Century Skills as a context for situating games-based learning and references Carol Channing's voice as a source of hope

“It is Magic”: A Global Perspective on what Technology Means to Youth

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, it is increasingly important to understand the relationships between technology and youth. We seek to understand this bond at a global level. We have conducted focus groups and\ud video diaries with middle-school aged children in three different countries: Hungary, India, and Morocco. Our exploration has yielded five themes highlighting the emotional perspectives of youth regarding the devices in their everyday lives: 1) awe and appreciation, 2) fun and entertainment, 3) boredom, 4) communication, and 5) negativity. This paper discusses these themes and their\ud significance

The Curative Power of Play: The Voices of Therapists around the World

It is important for all therapists to be culturally sensitive to children and their eco-systems as well as to be aware of the current trends and the changing application of play as a healing agent. The focus of this study is on the development of a current description of play by therapists from a global perspective through a thematic analysis of focus groups resulting in an explanation of how play contributes to healing and the practice of therapy. In this study, the naturalistic method of qualitative research (Bowers, 2009; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) was applied to the study of play around the world, resulting in a new description of “play”. The analyses of focus group meetings in Morocco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada and Europe resulted in the emergence of 8 themes: productivity through play, contribution to development, facilitation of the relationship through play, honouring diversity, collaboration between children and caregivers, stimulation through technology-based play, relaxation provided by play, and the devaluation of play. These themes, which are presented through the “voices of the participants”, together with the literature review, serve to enrich the changing description of play. With participants from all continents, a current global perspective highlights the changes that play, both as a concept and as a healing agent, has undergone and will continue to do so. New information emerged suggesting that technology has become a worldwide focus for children but has a paradoxical effect on their relationships