Research Foundation News

April 4, 2016  

Purdue students develop gamified MBA program for business schools

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Two Purdue graduate students are developing a gamified MBA program that teaches business concepts in an immersive, fantasy environment. The software platform aims to provide a more engaging, integrated, bite sized alternative to traditional MBA courses.

Arun S. Bharadwaj, an MBA student in Purdue's Krannert School of Management, and Jiaqi Wang, a graduate student in computer graphics technology in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute, developed the platform, MBAville. MBAville's first game, Project Quant, teaches accounting, analytics and economics in a pizzeria setting.

Bharadwaj said that traditional and online classrooms can be ineffective at engaging students.    

"Classrooms can be static in nature and if students are not engaged they can switch off after 15 or 20 minutes. It's the same with online education that mimics the classroom by using videos, slides and e-textbooks," Bharadwaj said. "Gamified systems are already being used by many companies for cybersecurity, improving customer engagement and goal tracking. Project Quant's bite sized courseware, interactive decision-making and gamified environment could provide students and professors a much better platform for learning and engagement."

Bharadwaj said current MBA programs are heavily focused on business academia, instead of real world applications.

"MBA programs teach accounting, analytics and economics separately, in silos. However, business education is going to be more beneficial to students if they are taught how these subjects integrate and fit the bigger picture," he said. "To be able to achieve that, you need a platform in which students use all the subjects at the same time and understand the different dynamics."

Project Quant is made up of several different "game days," which consists of a "biz feed" that teaches the analytics, microeconomics and accounting concepts, and a "business forecast" that provides students a certain scenario to act upon.

For the analytics courseware, users make raw material purchasing decisions using customer calorie requirements as the main metric. For microeconomics, the game uses interactive graphs that enable players to make pricing decisions. A large dashboard and flow tree teach accounting concepts, showing the different accounting heads an accountant would usually encounter and prompting users to record each transaction in the dashboard as they happen in-store.

"We want to build out 100 game days so that students can learn a wide variety of concepts and have fun playing the game over a longer period of time," Bharadwaj said. "For grading, we plan to build in decision logs that will allow students to justify each decision they make so professors can grade based on those answers."    

Bharadwaj previously pitched his idea to multiple business schools in India and is beginning to pitch to MBA programs in the U.S.

"We received a lot of positive feedback from the schools I visited in India," he said. "Many Indian business schools are looking for a gamified platform where students feel like they are running a real business. Project Quant fits that description and will keep players very engaged."

MBAville is available as a demo at demo.mbaville.com. An in-game video is available in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk0SDyLg1yU. The completed product will be available in the next few months.

Bharadwaj and Wang receive support from the Purdue Foundry, an entrepreneurship and commercialization hub located in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship at Purdue's Discovery Park, and the team went through the Purdue Foundry Launch Box program to further develop their product.  

About Purdue Foundry

The Purdue Foundry is an entrepreneurship and commercialization hub in Discovery Park's Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship whose professionals help Purdue innovators create startups. Managed by the Purdue Research Foundation, the Purdue Foundry received the 2014 Incubator Network of the Year by the National Business Incubation Association for its work in entrepreneurship. For more information about funding and investment opportunities in startups based on a Purdue innovation, contact the Purdue Foundry at foundry@prf.org

Purdue Research Foundation contact: Hillary Henry, 765-588-3586, hkhenry@prf.org

Source: Arun Sivasankar Bharadwaj, 765-337-3984, abharad@purdue.edu 

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