The Business Simulation Blog

Student engagement is a hot topic in education today, and for a good reason. With a multitude of distractions available to learners at any given time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make your course material both relatable and memorable over the long term. 

Business simulations can help you overcome this barrier by adding a hands-on learning element to your course that connects the dots between theory and practice.

As we have covered in previous articles, business simulations are already a fantastic supplementary tool on their own in higher education learning. Today we talked to Associate Professor Anssi Tarkiainen at Lappeenranta University of Technology about how he is taking the use of simulations to the next level. Professor Tarkiainen has been using Cesim Global Challenge for 5 years in a capstone course for the internationally accredited (EPAS accreditation) Master’s in International Marketing Management program offered at the LUT School of Business and Management. Recently, LUT was ranked as the best young university in the Nordic countries by Times Higher Education 100 under 50 rankings.

Cesim Bank is a browser-based bank management simulation game developed to facilitate understanding of the front and back office operations of a bank, and their interaction in a competitive environment, and to help cultivate a holistic and fact-based management culture, develop analytical skills, and create awareness about the current banking operating environment.

The flipped classroom is a term used to describe a reversed format in which students engage with pre-recorded video or audio materials in their own time prior to meeting face to face in more hands-on, workshop type lectures. Because of their independently playable nature, business simulations integrate really well with this increasingly popular classroom structure. 

In the past twenty years, numerous publications and pedagogical studies have presented several breakdowns about why simulations ought to be put to use in business school classrooms.