Students often struggle to adapt when simulation decisions don't go according to plan—leading to frustration and disengagement.
Justin Carter, Strategic Management Professor at the University of North Alabama, knew that to counteract this risk, he needed to get his students experimenting with the simulation early—before the competition rounds ever began.
Watch the video for a full breakdown of how Professor Carter uses practice rounds to boost engagement and instill confidence in his students.
Justin Carter, University of North Alabama Capstone Course Instructor:
"My name is Justin Carter. I teach the undergraduate Capstone course at the University of North Alabama, and one tip that I have for professors teaching the Capstone simulation is to take advantage of the practice rounds. You want to get students engaged early on as quickly as you can—experimenting and playing with the simulation before you ever get into the competition rounds.
If there's one risk that I think we need to focus on avoiding at all costs, it's losing engagement from students. And the biggest risk there is getting into the competition, students not knowing what's going on, feeling confused the first two or three rounds not going the way they hoped it would go, and they just disengage. You lose the group. That's probably one of the worst things that could possibly happen as you're going through the simulation is they don't feel like they have an opportunity to excel. They lose hope.
Developing these low-risk, easy-reward opportunities of four practice rounds before the simulation competition actually starts, giving them the opportunity to go in and fail, but try and experiment and learn way before we get into any type of competition, gives them that opportunity to at least have a good, solid foundation before starting the actual competition. So, we're mitigating that risk of losing groups, losing engagement, and basically leveling the playing field before we actually start the competition.
One thing that's really influenced the way that I approach the practice rounds is Tom Lozak in his TED Talk about the marshmallow experiment. He ran this experiment with different groups of individuals: business students, lawyers, architects. And basically, you have some spaghetti straws, you have some string, you have some tape, and the idea here is to work together as a team to build the highest tower you can possibly build with a marshmallow on top.
What he found in his experiment says business students were actually some of the worst-performing groups out there. The most successful groups, other than architects, which you would assume they'd be pretty good at it, were kindergartners. And one of the reasons why kindergartners were so successful over the business students is business students plan. They spend a lot of time strategizing, thinking about what they're going to do, putting things together, doing research, jotting down notes. They spend the vast majority of their time planning before they ever actually pick up the marshmallow.
Kindergartners, on the other hand, pick up the marshmallow really quick. I remember watching this video and thinking about my students and realizing they do the exact same thing. We throw them in the simulation, so they start going to Reddit, they start looking at YouTube videos, they start reading blogs, they create a plan and then they map it out and they think strategically, which is important, but they almost have analysis paralysis, right?
So by getting them into these practice rounds, emphasizing that this is a safe environment, a chance for you to go in, pick up the marshmallow, experiment, and play, you're giving them the opportunity to actually put some context into the materials you're going to provide for them later.
The way I set up the practice rounds, as soon as we form teams, I want to jump into those practice rounds as quickly as possible. The way I typically do it is we'll go for two weeks and each week, we'll run two practice rounds, so a total of four practice rounds. Right after each practice round, I'll post a video out to the class, usually by industry, kind of going into detail what happened in that industry, what different decisions that different groups are making. This is probably the most important part of taking advantage of the practice rounds. It's not just letting them go do these practice rounds, but it's providing feedback and coaching after each round.
Kind of use that as an opportunity to take specific examples and explain the concepts of finance, capacity, inventory management, looking at research and development, and why you make those decisions. Different customer criteria, looking at a forecast, looking at price, you know, how do you price these products? Doing that before they've actually gone into the simulation doesn't have a lot of context. It's not really going to resonate with the students. But if they just went through a round and especially if they were struggling with it, this is your prime opportunity to come back and say, 'Okay, let me explain it.' And they're going to be more interested in it now because they just went through it. And if they didn't understand it, they're going to pay attention because they want to understand it. And it just provides additional context because you're not talking about hypotheticals; you're talking about what just happened.
To summarize, the thing we're trying to avoid is we don't want to lose engagement from the students. And a lot of times when you go into the competition, the students can, if things don't go the way they thought it was going to go, they can get disengaged. You can actually lose groups. Because of this, and we want to mitigate that risk. And the way that I typically do this is by taking full advantage of the practice rounds. I try to do this as early as I possibly can, get them engaged, making sure I'm posting those videos for those coaching opportunities and learning opportunities to make sure that there is often as they can before we actually get into the competition. And I encourage you to do the same."