Computer-Assisted Gaming for Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

Entrepreneurship, defined as executive deal making, involves four core activities: venture selecting, planning, executing, and assessing. These activities can be supported in a computerized gaming simulation to achieve cost-effective learning by doing, to study strategic processes, and to assess business education. Computerized gaming simulations give objective scores and can be comprehensive, flexible, and easy to administer They should game pedagogically important processes and model pedagogically incidental ones. DEAL is a computerized business gaming simulation designed to test the concept of gaming all markets (resources, products, money, and interpersonal relationships) in a multi-industry setting. Instructor configurable, network cognizant, and activity driven, it includes five instructor-configurable industries and seven participant-selectable roles. Being computer assisted, DEAL is generally very different from other computerized entrepreneurship gaming simulations, which are either computer based or computer controlled. DEAL incorporates all four core entrepreneurship activities and reveals the developmental stages of emerging organizations. DEAL resolves with computer assistance problems of participant antagonisms and conspiracies. A gaming simulation should be evaluated on the extent it games defining processes with administrative ease. Gaming simulations should have greater value in assessing entrepreneurship education than in facilitating it.