Teaching methods for simulation games: The example of learning business process change

Business Process Change (BPC), aiming at improving the core competencies of a company, is a highly relevant topic in a rapidly changing business environment. Trends such as the digital transformation require companies to transform their business processes and may even lead to complete changes in how they operate. To prepare students for their future working environment, teaching BPC is an important topic for education in Information Systems, Computer Science, and Engineering. For this, simulation games provide a useful approach to provide students with more practical experience. To increase the learning outcomes of such games, different teaching methods can be used as part of them. However, previous research is lacking concrete insights which effects the different methods have when using them with simulation games. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to analyze different teaching methods for simulation games and to evaluate their effectiveness on the example of a game for learning BPC. First, we conduct a literature review on teaching methods and investigate whether they are suitable for teaching BPC. Afterwards, we develop a teaching concept for the simulation game using different methods such as experiential or case-based learning. Finally, we evaluate our teaching concept with 36 students from an upper vocational school and show the effectiveness of different methods when used as part of simulation games. Thereby, we contribute to the theory of teaching methods for simulation games and to practice by providing guidelines for teaching the topic of BPC using a simulation game.