Adapting Monopoly as an Intelligent Learning Game for Teaching Dynamic Competitive Strategy
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Date
2007-08-17
Authors
Yeh, C.R.
Tao, Y.H.
Hong, T.P.
Lin, W.Y.
Chen, P.C.
Wu, C.H.
Lin, C.W.
Journal Title
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Abstract
Competition is inevitable in the business environment. Competitive Strategy is thus a very
important subject in management education. However, due to the complexity of the concept
and business’s zero tolerance for strategy mistakes, the teaching of competitive strategy has
so far been limited to classroom discussions on theories and cases, without the benefit of
hands-on experiences for actual skill-building. A Monopoly-like game, when designed to
simulate business competition and developed with appropriate instructional strategy, can
provide students a viable venue to practice competitive decision making without jeopardizing
business operation. The Monopoly allows students to test out textbook theories in realistic
competitive situations, offering invaluable “learning by doing”opportunities from the
experiential learning perspective.
The traditional Monopoly board game has been incorporated into classroom activities in two
junior-level college classes. Initial feedback from students has been positive. However, the
traditional Monopoly game, paper-based or computer-based, is neither convenient nor
effective for instructional purposes. An intelligent “Strategy Monopoly”online game
designed with the teaching of competitive strategy concept in mind, not only provides the
benefit of a digital learning game or a computer simulation in improving student motivation,teacher feedback and other learning effects, but also has the ability to collect and analyze
students’learning-path data in order to design adaptive learning strategies for students with
different cognitive levels or learning styles. The large volume of learning-path data can be
stored in a data warehouse to be used with data mining techniques to validate the competitive
strategy theories, or to serve as a basis for designing an intelligent learning module embedded
within the Monopoly online game to consult students on rules of the game or strategy
decisions. The same set of data can also be used to deduce rules of winning competitive
decision making, thus provides ample opportunities to validate current strategy theories.
To move the “Strategy Monopoly”learning game from concept to reality, we assembled a
cross-disciplinary development team from the fields of Business Administration, Education,
Information Management, and Computer Sciences to submit a research project proposal to
the Taiwan’s National Science Council for funding. With the collaborative efforts, we have
established an integrated research project with three interrelated sub-projects to (1) design the
Strategy Monopoly game for teaching competitive strategy from instructional design
perspective, (2) develop the online game system from system development perspective, and
(3) design the intelligent tutoring component from the information technology perspective.
We first performed an in-depth review of the literature to justify the need for such an online
Strategy Monopoly game for management education. The review included the instructional
methods used in Taiwan, the characteristics and teaching challenges of business competitive
strategy, the application of experiential learning and simulation game in management
education, and the current status of Monopoly computer games. With the understanding of
the above literature, we then conducted an initial design focusing on the basic functionality of
the learning game and the intelligent tutoring component from both a short-term and a
long-term perspective. An UML (Uniform Modeling Language) case diagram was used to
explain how the system administrator, the teacher and the student actors will interact with
three system modules, i.e., system management setup, game management and learning game
system. Furthermore, a conceptual diagram depicting the relationship between learning-path
data warehouse and data mining was presented to show how applications of advanced
information technology can be used in instructional learning games, as opposed to the
traditional online game or e-learning context. Finally, we proposed using Java language,
MySQL database, Linux operations system and Apache web server for this learning game
environment. In particular, the use of Java was justified because of the strength in its
scalability and flexibility in future system development.
As its short-term objective, this development project aims to complete a prototype learning
game system that integrates learning of key competitive strategy concepts in a fun learning
environment. The prototype system will allow teachers to design and setup game parameters
easily for students to play and learn the desirable learning objectives in the strategiccompetition context. Furthermore, the design of embedded learning content, game path data
collection, learning path mining, and rule editing management will allow the teachers to
customize the learning game to students’different learning levels or styles or to provide
instant feedback to students on strategy decisions.
Several long-term goals are envisioned as outcomes of this project. In terms of the game
design, it can be adapted to different management contexts and thus can be used in other
management courses. In terms of game development, the project team will pursue expanding
the 2D multiple-innings game into a 3D instant game or mobile phone device environment. In
terms of online game environment, this project considers a point-to-point online game
environment to distribute the server load into different local servers in order to satisfy a
simultaneous in-flux of a large number of users on this game. In terms of learning assistance,
the learning game can be advanced to provide tutorials on competitive strategy, online
strategy analysis and recommendation, and self-learning computer agent as the playmate to
individual students. Besides, this game can evolve into a game engine or middleware to be
adopted by other game developers as a great time-saving template.
The research team strongly believes that the intelligent “Strategy Monopoly”learning game
will greatly strengthen the learning effects from using the traditional Monopoly in
Competitive Strategy course, and will serve as an example for the development and
application of simulation games in management education of Taiwan’s higher education
institutes.