SBIR Phase I: A Systematic Approach, Language and Platform for Building and Distributing Interactive Educational Games in Operations Management

This SBIR phase I project will create a web-based platform for developing and distributing interactive, mobile-enabled games for Information and Operations Management. Each of these games will illustrate one to two fundamental academic concepts by having students engage in short, round-based interactions that last less than one classroom session. Recent studies (Burke, 2012; Sitzmann, 2011), show that educational games, which focus on key concepts and provide immediate feedback to players, help students understand, learn and internalize fundamental academic concepts. The project addresses widespread obstacles reported by professors to incorporate games into their teaching, including the scarcity of games that were both relevant and technically capable in classroom environments. The broader impact of the proposed project is an increase in the adoption of pedagogically and academically validated educational games that facilitate retention and effective use of business concepts relevant to managing organizations. Hence, this proposal has potential to empower the workforce to be more productive and innovative, thus driving U.S. economic growth. Moreover, the eventual opening of the platform to a variety of third-party authors will accelerate game innovation and usage in other business and engineering disciplines at a lower cost, which will enhance the effectiveness of a broader STEM workforce. This project will employ automatically validated language to eliminate runtime errors in multiplayer Operations Management games, which will have been designed using a scientific Game Research & Development (GR&D) process for hosting on a web-distribution platform. Debugging runtime errors presents a particular challenge for non-professional programmers, such as professors. With runtime errors mitigated, the correctness of a program can be validated at compile time. Therefore, all games created with the project Game Description Language (GDL) will have a guaranteed level of technical quality and stability, allowing professors to focus on pedagogical relevance rather than technical stability of games. To mitigate the problem of runtime errors, this project employs methods of mainstream video game development, which relies heavily on non-professional programmers for storyline scripting. The main technical hurdle is that these methods must be tailored to result in automatically validated language capable of expressing the range of Operations Management games conceived during the GR&D process. The goal of the proposed R&D is a platform prototype able to support 10 simultaneous users of four games implemented using the GDL. Pilot tests with users will assess critical usability metrics to facilitate further, larger-scale testing and GDL improvements in Phase II.