Games, Simulations, Exercises and Experiments for Millennial Students of Economics
Forrest E. Stegelin, University of Georgia
Abstract: Successfully using games, simulations, exercises and experiments in teaching
undergraduate economics, marketing and management classes to today’s millennial students
requires a bit of magic by including entertainment, business savvy, and some luck. Inclusion of
these activities is to complement the lecture and textbook presentations, not replace, as well as to
encourage students to make decisions and interact so as to increase interest and decrease
skepticism about economic theory. An ‘Ah? Ha!’ teachable moment is no longer achieved one
student at a time, but in mass or in groups, requiring physical participation to find solutions that
can’t be done using smart phones, computers, or social media at one’s desk. The instructor should
create a competition for learning using team building exercises to reach consensus (‘we-we-we’)
decisions rather than individual (‘me-me-me’) decisions. The teacher must establish a teachable
moment, an objective or expected learning outcome for each game, simulation, or exercise, and
rewards (other than grades) are enumerated prior to the event. Emphasis should be on the ‘why’
story (not just facts), creating an emotional connection that leads to discovery. Example outcomes
for various activities include trading decisions, market demand and demand elasticities, efficient
allocations, or diminishing marginal returns.
Literature Review
“If you bet on a horse, that’s gambling. If you bet you can make three spades in poker, that’s entertainment. If you
bet cotton will go up three points, that’s business. See the difference?” is a quote attributed to William F. Sherrod
on the topic of succeeding in a competitive world, which today encompasses the college classroom as well as the
global economy.
The use of games, simulations, exercises and experiments in classroom instruction is not a new concept or learning
pedagogy (Heineke and Meile, 1995). There is, however, a newfound reason for including these activities in the
teaching environment – the current millennial students respond more favorably to active, competitive, and social
instruction of economics, rather than the standard lectures. Economics is a social science with a theoretic
foundation, and has not been praised as an experimental science. As economics has become more technical in
forecasting, strategies, and reactions, the use of games, simulations, exercises and experiments provides an
important connection between the theories and the key features or concepts being studied (Holt, 1999). Laboratory
experiments, ala voting and game theory and trading auctions, have long been conducted as means of proving
various economic hypotheses – dating back to the first Nobel Prize sixty years ago.
Game theory is often introduced into undergraduate economics course using the prisoner’s dilemma paradigm. The
prisoner’s dilemma illustrates the conflict between social incentives to cooperate and private incentives to defect,
and can stimulate discussion on the business management and economics topics of quality standards, trade barriers,
and price competition, among others suitable for courses in managerial economics, agribusiness economics,
environmental economics, and policy economics. Nonetheless, today’s millennial students seek learning stimulation
from other forms of games and activities, such as shuttling tennis balls to learn diminishing marginal returns,
building paper airplanes to gain an appreciation for designing, producing and marketing to meet consumer needs,
competing for food items (Snickers and Payday candy bars or Coke and Pepsi colas) to learn market demand and
demand elasticities and trading decisions, creating menus to see an auction market in action, flipping coins to
simulate door-to-door selling, or understanding the payoff of the prisoner’s dilemma using a deck of playing cards.
Goals and Objectives for the Practice Session
The goals and objectives for the practice session are two-fold for the attendees and participants:


Gain an appreciation of how to engage the millennial undergraduate economics student and to understand
how they learn, especially for those students who may never take another economics course and find no
current enjoyment nor need in learning economic theory, concepts, principles or applications.
Develop a tool box of simple, not time-consuming, yet participative activities to try in their classrooms,
including defining the teachable moment or objective or expected learning outcomes for each activity,
creating the competitive environment for learning, and establishing rubric or reward mechanisms, as well
as actually doing the activity (as time permits).
Descriptions of the Games, Simulations, Exercises and Experiments
A simulation is a decision-making tool that requires the development of a model of a process and testing the
performance of the model under various conditions; simulation does not find a solution to a problem, however.
Using simulation, the decision-maker can take a ‘what-if?’ approach to understanding a problem. In a selling or
sales course, for instance, a door-to-door simulation using groups of five students is plausible for the following
setup: The economy is bad! You are deciding whether or not to take a part-time job selling XYZ parts door to door,
and historical sales information (probability percentages) is available with outcomes. Four coins are needed to
complete the simulation representing the random variable of someone answering the door, whether a male or female
answers the door, and the success of the sales call. A simulation worksheet is provided to document the number of
coins flipped and the number of parts sold during one night’s work of making twenty calls. How did each group do,
and what kept them from doing better? Obviously, no sales if no one was at home.
Classroom economic experiments typically involve monetary payoff, suggesting that significant financial incentives
are inherent. If money is at stake, the college’s administration must be accepting and on board with the concept, so
that the interpretation to students and other stakeholders is not one of gambling. Small monetary incentives may be
useful, if only because they reduce the noise in the decisions, but are not necessary. The use of extra credit or bonus
points as incentives is much more controversial since fairness becomes a constraint that may conflict with the
teaching purpose, adding stress and conflicting with the key economic ideas, like mutual benefits from trade.
Several experiments are available, either online or from the author.
An interactive exercise that teaches the concept of marginal returns to students requires two buckets and a number of
tennis balls. Students are told they are part of the inputs required to generate a factory’s short run production
function. For each assembly line, one student is the timekeeper and a second is the output recorder while the other
students become workers on the production line. The buckets are placed about 20 feet apart in the classroom, and
the first worker picks up one tennis ball at a time and runs to the other bucket, placing the ball in the bucket, and
then returns to the first bucket to collect the next ball. The goal is to transfers as many tennis balls as possible
between buckets in thirty seconds. What would make this line more efficient? More workers! So a second worker
is added to the process. The balls must be handed (not tossed) between the workers, and determine how many balls
can be transferred in 30 seconds. Add a third worker, then a fourth, etc. At the end of each 30 seconds period, the
balls are counted and returned to the first bucket. Continue the 30-second runs until negative returns can be
demonstrated (fewer balls are transferred in 30 seconds because too much time lost with many workers in the line –
inefficiency). Graphing the data is also of help to the students to understand the concepts, especially as to when
adding workers – when marginal return starts to decrease or when it becomes negative.
Discussion
What is more important as a take-home message for the students: the quantitative calculation of a theory, or the
understanding of the implications of the why’s and what-if’s of the theory or concept? For today’s millennial
students, the latter is more significant. These activities allow for this learning by doing. Several positive results
occur from this change in teaching: students seem to remember concepts reinforced with an active learning activity,
and it provides a nice change of pace to the normal classroom.
References
Holt, C. (1999). Teaching economics with classroom experiments. Southern Economic Journal., 65(3), 603-610.
Heineke, J. & Meile, L. (1995). Games and Exercises for Operations Management: Hands-on Learning Activities
for Basic Concepts and Tools. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.