Getting Down to Business With a Fun Business Sim

What kind of business would you run?

In this post, we will be starting off on a sample lesson that could be used with many different mathematics classes. This game session is all about setting the stage and getting things started with just a taste of what will continue each game session.

Note that students will be concentrating mostly on the concept of what makes a businesses successful. Based on their individual philosophies and the collaborations with peers in their group, students will be making their first business choices for a fledgling start up business. Future posts will continue with this game with each post completing a turn or two and introducing more and more mathematics focal points. It will be important to emphasize that groups and individuals should be recording all data the game provides for future work that will be done. Perhaps a page in their journal could be used for data collection for each game turn.

Before students engage in any game play or exploration, get them reflecting on their individual values, feelings and hypotheses. Sample Journal prompts for this activity are:

• If you were in charge of a business which of the following aspects of your business would be most important to you. Please record why your selection would be so important in your day to day operation of the business.

1. The public loves my business and fully supports what we stand for.
2. Our business will not be undersold. Lowest price ... Guaranteed!
3. Our staff is ultra efficient and everyone gives 100% to meet our customers' needs.
4. My workers love to come to work. Their passion is what keeps customers coming back.
5. Connections make the business world go around. With friends in the right places anything is possible.
6. We maximize profits by utilizing the laws and rules of commerce to the maximum.

• When determining what your company would sell, share your philosophy in terms of what kinds of products you would promote. Should you stock a little of everything to meet everyone's needs? Should you just stick to the fast movers to keep the stock flying off the shelves? Maybe you should only stock the big ticket items that give huge profits but sales may be slower? In your opinion, what is the best way to stock goods for your business?

Try to group students in like groups. These groups will create business teams that will be working together to create business decisions for their start up company. You may have up to 6 groups. Although it is not necessary to have the same number of students in each group, you want to have at least three in a group.

Have these new groups discuss strategies and record justifications (about 5-10 minutes) concerning the following: 

• What percentage of profit is our minimum amount we would be happy with in a sale?
• Do we like investing money into long term growth or short term payouts?
• Running our business will require we not only determine our path, but we need to watch out for what others are doing. How can we best use the people in this group to do both? Should we all be doing a little of all the responsibilities or should we each take on a specific role and report findings and suggestions to the group?

These response should be submitted to the teacher for review and reflection as students experience the simulation.

Teacher sets up only one computer in such a way that groups will take a turn coming up to enter their choices. Try to position the computer so that a group up at the computer has some privacy from the rest of the class while still being in the same room. 

Teacher should go to the Zapitalism site ( http://www.zapitalism.com/home.php ) and logs in with her registered credentials. 

Choosing the PLAY FREE GAME option, choose TUTORIAL, and the teacher can now choose how many groups are available to play. There are always going to be 6 players but your student groups will be each playing one player role while the computer will fill in for the other players not used. Remember that you assembled the groups based on their journal reflections at the beginning of this session? Assign the following businesses to the groups that responded with the given value (#1-6)

Group valuing #1 get Tibi's Boutique

Group valuing #2 get Spinniker Discount

Group valuing #3 get Meister Mart

Group valuing #4 get Briggs Brothers

Group valuing #5 get Hoffmani's Emporium

Group valuing #6 get Grunion Company

The computer determines which company goes first. As a company get it's turn, they will click on the yellow building (Royal Wholesaler) in order to see what goods are for sale. As they click on each good, they get data on how many goods are available, what kind of demand is out there, and how many of each item is out in other stores at that moment. The first store up each round gets a nice advantage in that they get first choice. Groups should be notified that they only have space for 100 units in their store. They need to choose how many of each resource they wish to carry and why they want to do so. As they are making their selection they should write down decisions and justification. It is suggested you give each group only 4 or 5 minutes. 

Let every company complete their turn and save the game so you can resume when your next play session begins. To end this session, have students return to their journals and record the following:

• As part of any group effort, many opinions must be balanced. When thinking about what your company just invested in, compare those choices to what you might have done if you did not have to consult with others. 
• Did your company play it safe or take risks? 
• If you needed to be critical of your company's choices, what would you saw was the most questionable choice?

Notes:

What are groups doing while they are waiting for their turn? Much of this depends on what grade level you are working with and what their current mathematical experiences have been. It is advised that groups are working collaboratively to complete some practice problems that are in some way related to the concepts of investments, warehousing, profits, percents, bar graphs, ratios, pie graphs, and line graphs. All of these factors will be brought into play in the game as the second turn starts up in the next game class. It is not necessary for students to be able to create the graphs but they will have to be able to read them. Likewise they will not have to calculate profits and percents directly, but the evaluation of given values from the game will be important for the company learning from their choices in future choices. 

If you have access to computers for each group, it is advisable to have each group start researching real business practices. This research could be done with textual resources if those are available. For instance, questions like: 

• How do businesses use "Supply and Demand" to run their business?
• Is it possible for a business to remain in operation if their net assets are in the negative? 
• What is an "acceptable" profit margin for a business?
• Is the cost of insurance worth the possible security for businesses? Which types of insurance seem to be most prevalent in businesses that deal with warehousing and selling goods?

A reminder that data collection is important for students to later be using the data to create graphs and functions that will help them determine the directions their company will go. 

As a teacher interested in exploring, please take a moment to play this game on your own to see just how deep this experience is going to get. It is very impressive how many mathematics elements are included as well as actual business elements are included in this simulation. 

In our next session we will be starting turn two with tons of data crunching opportunities on the way. If students have not processed data very much, you will find this session FULL of options that process data in so many different mathematical ways.

Question for readers: Teachers all have different comfort zones. I would like to hear form readers how many details they would like to see in these posts. This post concentrated on how to set up the students and get them constructively thinking and working on starting off in this game. I did not fully flesh out the activities groups are doing while waiting. With so many different variables and content areas that could be used I may have some difficulty just putting one or two specific sets of directions. If I were able to offer specific directions, then I worry that teachers who are not engaged with that content currently will feel they are left out or that this experience can not be easily adopted. I will always provide alterations to anything I post if people share their needs in the comments. Where there are many content options available, do you feel it best that I supply at least one specific content example or is it better to suggest a number of content areas that could be used and address specific requests in the comments under the post?

Classroom Norms To Set The Stage

I have had the pleasure of working in classrooms from K-College in almost every subject. The diversity of style, mannerisms, comfort levels and attitude are as deep as one could imagine. As students come through our doors, it is important to explicitly state expectations and standards the teacher has in place. I plan do just that in this entry. I will layout options and assumptions I will be running with. If people comment that they have other options they wish me to include, I will make every effort to include how other options may look and feel in our activities with students.

Access to technology varies quite a bit. Here in Maine, our students are very blessed in that almost every school in our state provides some level of one-to-one computing. Access to computers and technology is so important that all motels and hotels in the state offer free Internet access and even most of our rest areas on the highway offer free Internet access. Clearly, not all readers will enjoy such opportunities. I will be assuming that there is at least one computer in the classroom with access to a printer and a projector. I will include notes for various configurations, but most of my resources are set up for the 1:1 environment, but I am hopeful that all teachers can incorporate suggestions in this blog independent of access to technology. As always, post questions about modifications in the comments of any post and I will respond with opinions and options.

Class size is another variable that varies widely. Some classrooms may have as few as 5 or 6 students while others are swamped with 30+. I am going to run on the assumption that most classrooms are in the 15-25 range. As the number of students in class increases, it is more vital that structure be adhered to in order to keep a positive flow going. Interestingly, I have found that having less than 10 students results in challenges that might be harder to overcome, especially with socially interactive exchanges.

A third variable relates to hobbies and interests. When someone mentions “games” there are some standards people may think of, such as sports, checkers, chess, tic-tac-toe ...As the author, I get to choose which games get focus by default. I will be presenting simulations, game construction tools, social interaction games and many other constructive materials teachers can extend to create positive learning opportunities. Many of my suggestions will be digitally online but there will be some offline options offered as well. For all online resources, I will be assuming that the teacher only has access to one computer in the classroom and guidelines will be provided to maximize that access. As always, if you have a request for me to include a type of game or theme or content to connect to, just leave some details in the comments and I will run with it.

One last variable is the cost of games. The Red Green fan in me thrives on the joy of finding new uses for free stuff and some duct tape. As such, most of the resources I share are all free and available on any computer that can run current browsers. Keeping browsers current is key to enjoying many free resources out there for educators. Unfortunately, not all computer technology teams in schools have an easy time ensuring that school computer browsers are updated often. There will be a game or two offline that I will suggest and offer lessons around. Those games often come out of the hot-bed of today’s gaming world, the European style games. While many in North America are absorbed in purely digital games, there is a growing offline game culture in Europe that is very refreshing to see. These games may run $50 to $100 at times which teachers may find daunting. I have had luck holding a bake sale just to get a new game.

Next post I will be introducing an online game for our exploration. My catalog of games to explore is quite vast. It would be helpful to hear comments on the first few entries so I could get a gauge of what subjects/levels people are working with to help me determine the most effective launching point. Lacking that information, I will be starting in with a simulation. Your question for this post is for you to make a choice. Would you rather start with a business simulation or a basketball simulation? Please rationalize your choice in terms of your students and why you feel one choice would be better for your batch of students.

Journals and teaching students to reflect.

The ability to introspect and reflect is something that needs to be cultivated in most people. You may ask a number of people, “What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” and get fairly quick and concise responses. Ask those same people, “Why is ____ your favorite flavor?” and you will immediately be able to gauge how well your population of people can reflect.

Education needs to be an active process. A process in which the student is assessing what is known and what still is unclear so that the student can then plan for some action to resolve those unclear items. The first step of creating active students is to teach them to be able to reflect on how they are thinking, what is their rational, what are their feelings and what are their values around almost any topic. This is typically not something most students are comfortable with processing and may find even more difficulty in communicating. One of the safest ways to help students start communicating is with a journal. This may be a written journal, a verbal journal, or even a video journal.

Many teachers that have tried to introduce journaling have quickly encountered difficulties in getting students to provide verbose and relevant responses to teacher prompts. Remember that students will be trying to learn how to mentally reflect on your prompts and they will be learning how to communicate those thoughts. Both actions can be difficult. I would suggest you start with a concentration on the journaling and slowly ramp up the quality of the student responses. Most importantly, teachers will want to create instances in which the processing done in the journal are needed to resolve later problems or issues.

I offer the following sample journal template you could use for a first session with students. This is a google document. If you are familiar with google documents you can click on File - Make Copy to have a copy of this form available for you to use. If you are setup to have students using google documents, you can make multiple copies of this journal and just rename each file with the student’s name and then use the sharing settings to share with each student. Of course you can print out the forms as well, but I would suggest adding more lines in each answer box to allow for students to provide full responses.

In this sample journal entry, the goal is to get students thinking about what they value in games and how those values compare and contrast to students in the class. Begin the session by having students think about the games they like best to play. Try to get them to extend to 3-5 games and they can be digital or offline games. Then have them record what they value most about those games using the first prompt in the Journal.

Next students will circulate (make sure you state a given time and call out a count down at half way, ¾ way and last 15 seconds) quickly comparing their three values with those of others to determine how many students match them at all. If there is a match how many values are similar. Have students get re-seated and do a quick go around to see how many found at least one other that had 3 matches the same, how many only 2, 1? Then provide them a short time to revise their three values to adapt their previous thinking to account from all the input they just received from peers.

Now armed with data and experiences, the teacher poses the real problem for this activity. What is the best method of grouping students if the ultimate situation would be 5 students in each group. Collect all the responses and share with students that you will look over the suggestions and present next class the most popular options for the class to decide on.

This lesson is not about academics, nor is it even really content oriented, but it will create a first experience of Reflect - Act - Reflect - Process - Evaluate. In future entries we can pose an essential question, then have students “play” to collect data and then use that data to construct responses and process issues. Given this kind of experience, the teacher can then tie the experience into more traditional lecture content that takes advantage of the “What if..?” excitement generated.

Since no one responded to the question posed in the last post, I will offer a more simple quandary. You may have heard the expression, “The squeaky wheel gets the most grease.” Please indicate general subjects you with to see demonstrated in future entries. My natural inclination is towards the Mathematics end of things as so little exists out there for higher level mathematics “play”. Every entry I will try to include little suggestions for subjects and for different grade levels, but unless I receive suggested content and grade level requests, I will probably stick to high school level mathematics. So, if you want other content or grade levels included, or if you want to ensure I stick with concentrations in mathematics or high school, this is your time to speak up :) Please offer your comments and suggestions.

Introduction to game-based learning

Introduction to game based learning

Hands on activities and lessons to get students learning through game play and game study.

Using games in a classroom is a practice that many teachers have employed from time to time in their career. These games are often part of a review before a test, a method of drill and practice, or as some reward or extension. Each of these three types of implementation are quite easy to set up or find resources for and many teachers feel that adopting one of these three options will suddenly increase learning for their students. Sadly, this is not the case. Student motivation may spike for a brief time, but little research supports any significant gains when games are used for review, practice, or reward. There is a growing body of research that indicates that teaching concepts through game play and exploration within game mechanics does have positive effects on student learning. There are many resources sharing these findings and I will post some of those from time to time on this blog. For starters you may want to read up on what game based learning is and is not.

Many teachers have bought into the idea of using games to instruct or to help students formulate concepts or develop procedures only to find that the available resources for such game implementation are not accessible. This blog will attempt to expose teachers to specific lesson and activities that use free games to help students learn. It is not enough to just point a student towards a game and say, "Go play and learn now squirt." There are very specific preparation steps needed to ensure that all students can learn with games. In each of these blog entries I will be sharing strategies and tips on how to get your students started with game based learning activities. 

With every blog entry I will be posing some questions to start off discussions. Feel free to drop your ideas in the comments area. For this first post, I would like to learn more about the readers in terms of subjects you teach. 

Could you please respond to the following: 

If you were to implement game based learning into a part of your instructional day, what specific topic or unit of study do you feel would be safest for you to use as a trial run? Please explain what this topic or unit encompasses and why you feel it would be safest for experimentation with game based learning?