Developing educational games in project management

Well designed games can provide an excellent environment to develop project management competence. However, there are several requirements that must be satisfied in order to facilitate experience flow and competence enhancement while playing the game. The paper provide a literature review about these requirements and then gives a description to an educational game that was developed by students attending an Expert in Teams course at NTNU under the supervision of the author. The developed game is then reviewed with respect to the fundamental requirements that must be satisfied. The results of evaluating the developed game shows that the game provides a good framework for competence development and it satisfies (to a certain degrees) several requirements such as usability, skill matching, gameplay, problem solving and balance in a valid experimental learning context. The game is competitive and allows collaborative learning as well. The main problem solving domain of the game is within the theme of project planning and control, the game main shortcoming is that it does not support any competence development in the soft skills domain. The game is well suited to be used as educational tool for the students taking an introductory course in project planning and control. Although the work was developed within the subject of EiT, the paper does not provide an evaluation of the impact of this context on the resultant game design.