A plug and play pathway approach for operations management games development

Many researchers have advocated the use of games (and simulations) to enhance students’ learning. Research has shown that in order to promote a deeper understanding of material, students ought to be engaged with what they are doing. However, there are limited interactive games for classroom teaching, especially within the operations management subject area. In light of this, this paper proposes the development of a plug and play interactive game pathway to enhance students learning.The proposed game pathway would provide four advantages to support learning: (a) making knowledge accessible; (b) making thinking visible; (c) making learning fun; and (d) promoting autonomous learning. The benefit of a plug and play (PnP) platform is that it allows future games to be added to suit various students’ level. This paper reports the experiment results and discusses the implications of this study on classroom teaching.