Apply HN: MBAville – Business Education, Gamified

[arunbharadwaj]

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q2/purdue-stude...

MBAville builds games for business education. Our first product, Project Quant, teaches Accounting, Analytics and Economics in a gamified pizzeria setting. We find the classroom to be boring and un-engaging. What better way to learn business education than by actually managing a virtual company.

Our formula for engagement is bite sized learning, gamified environment, in-game course ware and subject integration. In Project Quant, the student will triple up as an economist, data scientist and accountant. We are looking for beta testers to use Project Quant. If you find it interesting, please contact : [e-mail], [e-mail]

We are a team of 2 co-founders from Purdue University: a MBA and a Masters in Computer Graphics technology. The MBA co-founder was an avid simulation gamer when young and believes that all of business education can be simulated on a massive multiplayer game featuring industries, economies and human behavior. The Computer Graphics co-founder has been building games all through his life and is very proficient in most programming languages.

[afrancis]

MBAville builds games for business education. Our first product, Project Quant, teaches Accounting, Analytics and Economics in a gamified pizzeria setting. We find the classroom to be boring and un-engaging.

I have taken MBA courses. For the most part, I found the classroom to be highly engaging, especially when case studies are being presented. I suspect, I, like many people that have gone through graduate management programmes, will disagree with your fundamental premise. Mind you, since my concentration was operations, I have both played simulations (and loved them) and had to develop simulations. So I am not unfamiliar to games and simulations as learning tools. However its only one of many tools. Perhaps you should change the tone of your proposal since I think it would alienate the audience that would most likely buy your product.

[arunbharadwaj]

Yes. I agree with the part that this would alienate my audience. But let me ask you something about case studies. Case studies provide all the required information in the case itself. Do you believe this to be right? Don`t you think that in the real world, you are faced with many situations where available data is highly ambiguous and unreliable. As a matter of fact, I find case competitions to be more engaging since case competitions only give you a small portion of data needed to analyze the scenario. The rest of the data has to be mined by the student. This is where his or her managerial and strategic ability comes into focus. Great managers, investors and entrepreneurs are those who make reliable assumptions of missing data. Unfortunately, the case study method never lets you do anything of that sort.Would really like to continue the conversation. Thank You

[afrancis]

Case studies provide all the required information in the case itself. Do you believe this to be right?

The case study is a learning tool. The required information is a starting point. It is up to the student to use the information "correctly." I recall doing one case study in a TQM course, where I was the only person who bothered to crunch the numbers and create a simple income statement which provided a powerful insight: higher than projected retail prices wasn't killing the company. Rather its return and rework expenses were.

Don`t you think that in the real world, you are faced with many situations where available data is highly ambiguous and unreliable.

Yes. However I think you are misunderstanding me. I have a graduate background in computer science and management. I've played games. However I can't recall many times I was bored in an MBA class. All other things being equal, I don't believe MBA courses, or any course, needs gamification to keep students interested. That is not the selling point. I think more about when Alan Kay talked about the rise of "Skeptical Man" and his ability to create powerful simulations and perform what-ifs and see things from multiple points-of-view. Perhaps Y-Combinator is the wrong place to argue about pedagogy. You probably have a good product. Just the rhetoric is off-putting. Immersive long running games are definitely a part of the future of business education*. Throw in some form of integration with an ERP, you have some really powerful stuff going on....

[arunbharadwaj]

Thank You. Sorry for the rhetoric. It is unintentional and is due to my belief that a substantially better system can be created.