Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Discussions about educational uses of Capitalism II
Meiaman
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Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by Meiaman »

Hello everyone. As i said before on another topic, i am here to state a feedback about our experience using capitalism 2. :mrgreen:

Using capitalism 2 1.07
Our experience: Usage of capitalism 2 in classroom.

Where: Ceará, Brazil. Federal University of Ceará (UFC). New Business Class

When: October-November, 2014

How: Computer lab. Students divided into groups of 3-4. Every group is a player. Multiplayer matches with 10 groups divided into 2 host group (due to the 7 players limit on multiplayer). Students play 45 minutes per class, using a total of 10 classes, where 2 were separated for tutorial and explanation of game mechanics. Afterwards... a small presentation where students would report the experience with the game to the rest of the classroom.

Aimed results: Students would practice and experience business related theories inside the simulator.

Feedback
The good

Capitalism 2 is indeed a powerful tool to catch the students interest. I have yet to see any study case making the classmates as engaged into what they are doing as this game does. The students reported having a great experience with the game, where they could practice and perceive some of the studied theories.

The bad

I believe the game still needs a lot of shaping to be fully adapted to educational purposes. Right now it is already a good tool, but there are a number of things that hinder down the experience from becoming a complete perfection and requires a lot of working around from the part of the teachers to pull this game properly, through i will continue using this game because the results were satisfying to me. I will number the bad points below.

1. Long learning curve
The students took awhile to be able to understand the game enough to operate it reasonably well. Took them 2 classes to learn. This isn´t bad by itself, but the problem is the tutorial (v 1.07) is not that useful. Since the tutorial forces the students to take some actions, it was common for them to be stuck in some parts of it, and i found out that explaining the mechanics by myself was much more effective.

2. Multiplayer limits
I believe one of the core ideas of using this in a classroom is for students to be able to compete directly against each other and have their actions impact (on a lesser or a bigger scale) the business of other students. Having a group dominate a market where others have trouble competing is a very nice sight. The problem is the game direct multiplayer function is very limited. Only 7 player on a game makes it very restrict. My solution was using more than one simultaneous hosting group.

And that also brings another problem: disconections. I still have not found out the origin of this problem, if the host started a game without someone or something, so i am hosting myself to have a better control this time. Anyway, the question is what to do once a player goes bankrupt or is disconnected from a game due to any reason? A nice feature would be allowing the player to have a fresh start on an ongoing multiplayer game, so the group dont stay alone or the professor needs to restart all over due to one group.

All these problems simply dissapear by using a single player approach, but i believe all the experience regarding aliances is lost without the multiplayer, so for the time being, i am sticking to multiplayer and working around the problems. :x

3. Language
The game needs an easier and more acessible language changing methods.


That is it for now. I do recommend this game for classroom, but i also recommend for teachers to have an assistant who is computer savyy, so you can properly pull the experience and work around the limitations. :geek:
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rmax
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by rmax »

Cool stuff!

It is bad that Capitalism Lab hasn't multiplayer. It develops more actively, especially in comprasion with Capitalism 2, has more nice features and localisation functionality. But "multiplayer" is limited to only indirect challenge games :(
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by Meiaman »

Hi guys. Im announcing Capitalism 2 in class: round 2;

It is time to use the simulator with a new class.

Depending on how it goes, i might also write a guide to maximize the usefulness of the simulator in class. I will keep updates until then, stay tuned.
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by David »

Look forward to your new write-up on educational uses of Capitalism 2.

If you are interested in using Capitalism Lab for teaching, you may contact me at info@enlight.com and I will be happy to offer you a special discount deal for educational purposes.
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by Meiaman »

Short update:

We are running the second experiment in business creation class, with 49 students.

And...

It has been a big success. We decided to scrap the multiplayer to avoid any issues and decided to use an indirect method of competition (ie: comparing the score reports of each group), this makes the game much easier and faster to set up and avoid all connectivity issues which plagued the first experiment. Unlike what i previously imagined, this did not damper the competitiveness the students showed.

Instead of a single computer for a group of 5 people, now we give each student a computer, but they still must act as a group despite each operating their own business individually (some sort of business conglomerate, where their score is sumed up and avaliated as a mean), so they must aid each other by exchanging information and helping with management, this kind of behavior was exceptionally present in some groups.

Another behavior some students displayed was trying to estabilish a link with the game and business concepts, such as SWOT analysis or PDCA cycle.

We did not finish the experiment yet, i will write the guide when we conclude the experiment, but what i can say so far is capitalism 2 can be a great tool once you figure out the correct methodology to use with.


Experimenting at: Brazil, Federal University of Ceará.

Ps: thanks for the discount deal. I will consider capitalism lab if the university shows interest in funding the project.
Last edited by Meiaman on Sun May 24, 2015 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by counting »

Meiaman wrote: ...
Another behavior some students displayed was trying to establish a link with the game and business concepts, such as SWAT analysis or PDCA cycle.
...
Never thought to use SWOT analysis in Capitalism game, but it does make sense as a practice platform. I'd really like to see what kind of SWOT charts your students come up with, must be very interesting.

Considering Capitalism games simulate the area of starting businesses from the ground up, I believe they are also suitable for entrepreneurs as practice tools, like the Business Model Canvas. I wonder what more can be included with Caplab (with future city simulation, service industry, and banking expansion, should be even more exciting!)
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Meiaman
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by Meiaman »

counting wrote:
Meiaman wrote: ...
Another behavior some students displayed was trying to establish a link with the game and business concepts, such as SWAT analysis or PDCA cycle.
...
Never thought to use SWOT analysis in Capitalism game, but it does make sense as a practice platform. I'd really like to see what kind of SWOT charts your students come up with, must be very interesting.

Considering Capitalism games simulate the area of starting businesses from the ground up, I believe they are also suitable for entrepreneurs as practice tools, like the Business Model Canvas. I wonder what more can be included with Caplab (with future city simulation, service industry, and banking expansion, should be even more exciting!)

On The last experiment days they are supposed to present a report and a presentation linking administration concepts with the game. I am curious as well if they will include SWOT and how they gonna do it or what else they going to come up with. I will update when that happens.

I also would like to inform that to prevent contamination, im not suggesting or giving concepts for them to link, i just gave them the activity and they came up with that on their own.
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by Meiaman »

Another not so short update:

The simulator doesn't seems to please the older students much (which is a minority), we have a few students which are on their forties and they skip class, then again, most of those older students doesn´t give much priority to university and most of them are enrolled for a longer time they are supposed to (most have full-time jobs and families) so any assumption based on this minority are not reliable.

One of such students came to us saying he didn´t appreciate the experience much because its not that he felt it was lacking, but rather he felt it was too much and he could not keep up with all the information present to him in the simulator and would enjoy something simpler.

I would say the problem here is that some students are not used to strategic thinking or to make decisions based on any prior planning with grounded information for support.

In Ceará State of Brazil, smart planning is still an art known only by some specialized companies, university doesn´t help students practice these habits nor do they have experiences while working for companies with this kind of stuff, so most of them are locked in operational tasks or, at best, some minor manager position, those who experience strategic planning before their graduation are a point out of the chart.

So the question here is how to convince students to try to read the reports and think strategically instead of randomly placing shops all around the place? Going without planning do work on real life and on lower difficulties of the simulator, but it is quite hard to survive on higher difficulties or unstable economies if you dont play smart.

On another note, such cases of smart planning did happen in 3 groups (from what i could notice so far), here a few specific cases:

1. Female student (game is popular among female students) based her planning on clothes industry and focused on a few products. She quickly earned dominance over that market which greatly boosted her score (current group ranking in class: 2nd place)

2. Group used strategy based on the goals estabilished for them (goal report), and thus were planning actions and trading inside information specifically to increase their score. (looks like a goal oriented planning) (group ranking in class: 1st place)

3. Group came with an organized plan based on each individual specialty, example: one of them was earning a large ammount of money for the other members using the stock market. They even made some rules that the members must follow to maximize their efficiency. (group ranking in class: 3rd place).

From what i could notice from the other groups, they were less organized as a group and functioned more as individuals, this seems to vary a lot between student to student.

Anyway, i apologize for any subjectivism in my short updates, as for now, i can only report what i learn about by observation and by speaking with students. In 1 month there will be the presentations from the students and the official feedbacks. Stay tuned until then.
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by counting »

I'm curious though, if 5 students all share one single player save file, how do they organize the time table? And how do they sit in front of a computer? Or one student running one year and another sequentially? Or they act like real corporation where they organize themselves to determine how to operate as a whole? Are there some kind of default rules? I imagine it would require some well-defined "design" for it to be a regular course practice/activity for students (especially undergraduates, who might be more willingly to accept game simulation as a mean to study)
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Re: Feedback: our experience with capitalism 2

Post by Meiaman »

counting wrote:I'm curious though, if 5 students all share one single player save file, how do they organize the time table? And how do they sit in front of a computer? Or one student running one year and another sequentially? Or they act like real corporation where they organize themselves to determine how to operate as a whole? Are there some kind of default rules? I imagine it would require some well-defined "design" for it to be a regular course practice/activity for students (especially undergraduates, who might be more willingly to accept game simulation as a mean to study)

Um, i'm not using a single file for a group of 5 students, i did that on the 1st experiment and what happened was that 1 or 2 students did all the work while the rest of them did their own personal stuff. I consider that a terrible result.

What i am doing now on this 2nd experiment is to give one computer per person, so a 5 person group will have 5 computers, one for each person. So the file and the company is individual, however, the 5 students are part of a conglomerate (their group), so their score will be computed by the mean score of the group, so dezpite your team mate having his own individual business, what he is doing is of your interest because if he does bad with his business, it will bring the mean score of the whole group down, and for that, it is very important that the students have in mind that they are competing with other groups.

This new method proved to be quite a success with some groups, while giving a computer for each person eliminated almost completely the "one student work, 4 lazy around" problem.

And yes, the methodology you use to aplicate the game in the classroom makes an huge diference, i could tel that by how much better the 2nd experiment was compared to the 1st.

I will write everything you need to know and my complete methodology when i finish the guide.
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