Deploying Serious Games for Management in Higher Education: lessons learned and good practices

The deployment rate of serious games (SGs) in higher education (HE) and their proper insertion in meaningful curricula is still quite low. There is a lack of papers in literature describing deployment of SGs for HE in detail, critically showing educational benefits, and providing guidelines and best practices on their use. With the present work, we intend to make a first step in this direction, by reporting our experience in using state of the art managerial SGs in MSc Engineering/business courses in four different European universities. In order to describe and analyse the educational characteristics and effectiveness of each game, we propose to use two models that we have straightforwardly extracted from two major pedagogical paradigms: the Bloom’s revised cognitive learning goals taxonomy and the Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. Based on our experience in developing the SG-based courses, we also propose a set of lessons and practices that we believe could be of interest to incentivize and better support deployment of SGs in HE courses