Game-based Learning enables students to undertake tasks and situations which would otherwise be impossible or undesirable for cost, time, logistical and safety reasons. As a matter of fact, this training technique allows learners to earn skills which wouldn't be developed through a traditional didactic approach. It is important to consider negotiation capabilities among the skills that may not be developed just by reading a book or by learning through a teacher. Only a small niche in the wide panorama of ``Serious Games'' focuses on negotiation and just a couple of them are designed in a software version. More importantly, the majority of them are ``single-player'' games, in which learners are able to choose only among a few predetermined choices. This paper will introduce Win Win Manager, an online multiplayer business game that focuses on negotiation. Multiplayer technology allows a deeper learning, favours a greater commitment of the students and allows a continuous comparison between users boosting competition, fun and commitment through a more realistic approach. It will be demonstrated how Win Win Manager achieves its formative goal, providing quantitative evidence of an increase in the users' negotiation skills, and showing the outcome of a survey on perceived improvement in users. In Win Win Manager players negotiate online in randomly selected couples, using a private discussion board, on each of the ten scenarios provided by the game. Players obtain a score accordingly with the results of their negotiation. In the first edition of Win Win Manager we noticed that both linear and polynomial tendency curves of players' mean scores increased in a monotonic way as the difficulty of the scenarios increases. The second edition of Win Win Manager seems to comply with this trend. Even if such score is very useful for evaluating each players performance, it often doesn't provide an adequate feedback for him. Thus, in the second edition of Win Win Manager, we introduced a feedback algorithm complementary to the score, which we will briefly introduce in this paper.
Improving Negotiation Skills Through an Online Business Game
GRECO, Marco;
2007-01-01
Abstract
Game-based Learning enables students to undertake tasks and situations which would otherwise be impossible or undesirable for cost, time, logistical and safety reasons. As a matter of fact, this training technique allows learners to earn skills which wouldn't be developed through a traditional didactic approach. It is important to consider negotiation capabilities among the skills that may not be developed just by reading a book or by learning through a teacher. Only a small niche in the wide panorama of ``Serious Games'' focuses on negotiation and just a couple of them are designed in a software version. More importantly, the majority of them are ``single-player'' games, in which learners are able to choose only among a few predetermined choices. This paper will introduce Win Win Manager, an online multiplayer business game that focuses on negotiation. Multiplayer technology allows a deeper learning, favours a greater commitment of the students and allows a continuous comparison between users boosting competition, fun and commitment through a more realistic approach. It will be demonstrated how Win Win Manager achieves its formative goal, providing quantitative evidence of an increase in the users' negotiation skills, and showing the outcome of a survey on perceived improvement in users. In Win Win Manager players negotiate online in randomly selected couples, using a private discussion board, on each of the ten scenarios provided by the game. Players obtain a score accordingly with the results of their negotiation. In the first edition of Win Win Manager we noticed that both linear and polynomial tendency curves of players' mean scores increased in a monotonic way as the difficulty of the scenarios increases. The second edition of Win Win Manager seems to comply with this trend. Even if such score is very useful for evaluating each players performance, it often doesn't provide an adequate feedback for him. Thus, in the second edition of Win Win Manager, we introduced a feedback algorithm complementary to the score, which we will briefly introduce in this paper.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
