Bringing games into the classroom in teaching quality control

The increasing pressures from students, industry, government, and accreditation organizations demand a paradigm shift in engineering education to turn the focus of education from instruction to learning. In the course of Quality Control at the University of Manitoba, the concepts and principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) are usually taught through a series of lectures. Given the fact that few of the students have had any industrial experience, traditional lectures on this topic tend to be boring and ineffective. This work developed a game approach to simulate the dynamics between the customer and competitive manufacturing companies. Students were divided into one customer group and a few competitive manufacturing groups/companies producing maple leaf bookmarks. By role-taking and game playing, students gain a quick appreciation of four of the six main TQM concepts, i.e., management commitment, customer satisfaction, action of all, and continuous improvement. Based on students' feedback, this approach was proved to be effective in teaching abstract concepts and in giving students a certain level of real-world experience. The specific game designed in this work might be tailored for teaching other industrial engineering and manufacturing courses. The game method, as a general approach, might be further studied and developed for engineering education.