IBM INNOV8 BUSINESS SIMULATION GAMES FOR E-LEARNING AND EDUCATION

The authors present in this paper the environment, the development and the results of the Serious Games exploitation for Master's level teaching, where the studied games are proposed by IBM in its INNOV8 Smarter Scenarios. The students that are using the system are enrolled at the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages from the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest in the Master program of Business Administration and Engineering. The particularities of this academic program come from the teaching activities given in English to students from different countries (from Europe, Africa and Asia) and with very different backgrounds (in engineering, economic studies, sciences). The INNOV8 games are based on IBM's Smarter Planet real-world examples: Smarter Traffic (regulate the flow of traffic in a city), Smarter Supply Chain (maximize efficiency and profitability while reducing carbon emissions) and Smarter Customer Service (maximize customer satisfaction and revenue). They introduce students to Business Process Management (BPM) fundamentals, from early discovery and modeling stage to analysis, optimization and monitoring. The interdisciplinary nature of BPM make the introduction and the study of its concepts particularly difficult. The traditional teaching methods are inefficient because the majority of students have a narrow understanding of business processes, a lack of modelling awareness and no practical experience. Simulation-based training enables the development of management skills much faster than the classical learning and offers insight into the business that is studied. Data collected from 2011 to 2015 is used to analyze the value of simulation games in education, the degree of satisfaction for the students, the perceived usefulness and the most important features of business simulation games, as well as the results obtained by the students considering different criteria.