IIM Udaipur to gamify Management Education through a fun-learning elective course – Management Games

July 13th, 2022; Udaipur: Taking a stride in innovation in management teaching, the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur (IIM Udaipur) has strengthened its MBA program with a new fun learning course – Management Games, which promotes decision making through the application of management theories to real-time situations. It is a carefully curated course where students first play board games which are followed by debriefing sessions, where the faculty connects these games to management learnings. This year onwards, the institute will incorporate this as a full 30-hour course as part of their MBA program, where students will be learning through this distinctive pedagogy to ensure very high engagement and retention levels.

Speaking about the course, Prof Shobhit Aggarwal, who teaches the ‘Management Games’ course said, “I believe that gamification of management education would revolutionize the way we think about learning. The board-game-based pedagogy already has acceptance in the corporate world and the reviews received from both corporates and students alike are exceptionally good. I am confident that this experiential learning pedagogy is the future of high-impact management education – both in business school courses and in corporate training requirements.”

Sharing more insights about the evolving pedagogy, Prof. Janat Shah, Director, IIM Udaipur, said, “This course will equip students with advanced education that will enable them to manage real-world situations in the chosen field. It will also help them to enhance their problem-solving abilities required in industry practices. We’re expanding theoretical learning in the classroom to better grasp real-world difficulties during industrial applications. There can be no better teaching than the practical knowledge of taking management decisions instead of learning the theory.”

In this unique pedagogy, students first play a board game, followed by a concept session that relates their experiences in the game to specific management concepts. It also allows students an opportunity to apply the concepts they learned during their MBA. The course was run at IIM Udaipur as a 15 hours course in the Academic Year 2021-22 and received excellent student reviews. Hence, from this year onwards, this course will extend to a full 30 hours course.

This course includes the following key concepts in the games –
• Integrative Negotiation
• Critical Thinking
• Collaboration
• Efficient Resource Utilization

As the course expands to a full 30-hour offering, more management concepts will be added to it.