The benefits of board games are clearly established. Playing board games as a young child can help improve hand-eye coordination, help with identifying and recognizing colors and understanding abstract concepts. There is a lot that board gaming puts on the table. One professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Udaipur is confident that board games deserve to be a 30-hour course as part of the university’s MBA program. The course is aptly named “Management Games.”
Teaching MBA with Board Games
The new course was first run as a pilot test but will be coming back to academic life in the university this year and incorporating board games into the learning process. Essentially, students will be introduced to a board game and then participate in debriefing sessions to help transfer the abilities and observations learned and made during the game to real-life examples of management.
Prof Shobhit Aggarwal is confident that the gamification of management education is the next way to help students not only acquire core skills but also obtain the out-of-the-box thinking that comes with it.
Prof Aggarwal teaches the course, arguing that it would revolutionize the way people think about learning. There is a number of concepts that can be picked through this method, including efficient resource management, collaboration, negotiation, and critical thinking.
Using games in teaching is not new, and it is an increasingly efficient way to break down even harder concepts and make them easy to understand. Commenting on the “Management Games” course, Prof Aggarwal said:
The board-game-based pedagogy already has acceptance in the corporate world and the reviews received from both corporates and students alike are exceptionally good.
Prof Shobhit Aggarwal
This course is just a beginning, argues Prof Aggarwal who sees the course as an opportunity to change the way management education takes place in business school courses. He is even more confident that this course could one day revisit the training requirements for corporations.
Helping Students Pick Core Concepts and Apply Skills
Equally important, the course will help students to manage real-world situations in their chosen field in a safe environment. Prof Aggarwal is confident that the course comes with a clear expansion of students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills, adding:
We’re expanding theoretical learning in the classroom to better grasp real-world difficulties during industrial applications. There can be no better way of teaching than imparting practical knowledge of making management decisions.
Prof Shobhit Aggarwal
Students still need to learn management concepts obtained through their MBA studies, but they will have the opportunity to put it into practical use thanks to the board game that Prof Aggarwal is using. The board games world is not short on excellent games, but best among them is “Cashflow” designed by Robert Kiyosaki.