SBIR-STTR Award

This SBIR phase I project will create a web-based platform for developing and distributing interactive, mobile-enabled games for Information and Operations Management. Each of these games will illustrate one to two fundamental academic concepts by having students engage in short, round-based interactions that last less than one classroom session. Recent studies (Burke, 2012; Sitzmann, 2011), show that educational games, which focus on key concepts and provide immediate feedback to players, help students understand, learn and internalize fundamental academic concepts. The project addresses widespread obstacles reported by professors to incorporate games into their teaching, including the scarcity of games that were both relevant and technically capable in classroom environments. The broader impact of the proposed project is an increase in the adoption of pedagogically and academically validated educational games that facilitate retention and effective use of business concepts relevant to managing organizations. Hence, this proposal has potential to empower the workforce to be more productive and innovative, thus driving U.S. economic growth. Moreover, the eventual opening of the platform to a variety of third-party authors will accelerate game innovation and usage in other business and engineering disciplines at a lower cost, which will enhance the effectiveness of a broader STEM workforce. This project will employ automatically validated language to eliminate runtime errors in multiplayer Operations Management games, which will have been designed using a scientific Game Research & Development (GR&D) process for hosting on a web-distribution platform. Debugging runtime errors presents a particular challenge for non-professional programmers, such as professors. With runtime errors mitigated, the correctness of a program can be validated at compile time. Therefore, all games created with the project Game Description Language (GDL) will have a guaranteed level of technical quality and stability, allowing professors to focus on pedagogical relevance rather than technical stability of games. To mitigate the problem of runtime errors, this project employs methods of mainstream video game development, which relies heavily on non-professional programmers for storyline scripting. The main technical hurdle is that these methods must be tailored to result in automatically validated language capable of expressing the range of Operations Management games conceived during the GR&D process. The goal of the proposed R&D is a platform prototype able to support 10 simultaneous users of four games implemented using the GDL. Pilot tests with users will assess critical usability metrics to facilitate further, larger-scale testing and GDL improvements in Phase II.

This SBIR Phase II project should increase the adoption of pedagogically validated educational games that facilitate retention and effective use of business concepts taught and relevant to managing organizations. Start-ups, for-profit and nonprofit companies all need managers who can make effective decisions in the face of complexity and uncertainty. It is of the utmost importance to society, therefore, that the next generation of business leaders is equipped with relevant frameworks and tools that supplement traditional teaching methods and enable effective use of knowledge on the job. Hence, this project has the potential to empower the U.S. workforce to be more productive and innovative, which will improve existing business outcomes and thus drive U.S. job and economic growth. Improved business operations will also lead to more profitable business in general and potentially larger tax revenues for the U.S. government. Eventually opening the GDL to third-party authors in the $18.6 billion global game-based learning market will accelerate game innovation and usage in other business and engineering disciplines at a lower cost, which will both enhance the effectiveness of the STEM workforce and encourage more economic activity in the game development market.This project is based on three innovations that differentiate this solution from others: (1) a scientific Game Research and Development (GR&D) process designs games containing pedagogical learning objectives; (2) a Game Design Language (GDL) accelerates implementation of game concepts as automatically validated, domain specific language while eliminating runtime errors; and (3) an innovative web Game Distribution Platform (GDP) minimizes the effort to setup and manage games in the classroom. Typical educational game development in languages such as JavaScript is time-consuming, involves professional software engineers and requires debugging of runtime errors, while usage of game technology in the class is disruptive to the flow of instruction. Such challenges are therefore prohibitive for non-professional programmers and game administrators such as professors. To mitigate the problem of runtime errors, this project employs methods of video game development, which typically use domain-specific languages based on non-Turing-complete models of computation to solve these issues. Games created with GDL will enable rapid new game development and have a guaranteed level of technical quality, allowing professors to focus on pedagogical relevance during instruction. The main technical hurdle is to tailor these methods to result in GDL capable of expressing the Operations Management (OM) games conceived during the scientific GR&D process and playable via the GDP that enables seamless class integration.