The Impact of Serious Games in Economic and Business Education: A Case of ERP Business Simulation

Digitalisation nowadays impacts business environments significantly. Therefore, if higher education wants to educate students properly for a successful career path, the business and economics curriculum must be enriched with innovative teaching approaches covering actual topics, such as, for example, the implementation of the ERPsim business simulation, a representative of serious games. The ERPsim business simulation is based on SAP ERP, and is aimed at teaching ERP concepts. It covers different business processes, and allows students to learn using a hands-on approach, simulating real-life scenarios. The presented research focuses on using an ERPsim business simulation as the introduction to the course. The simulation was implemented to ease the introduction of ERP and IT concepts to the business and economic oriented students. Considering the positive effects of serious games and gamification, our research was formed and focused on knowledge acquisition and future student engagement. We researched whether participation in the introductory simulation results in significant knowledge gain and impacts students' future course engagement. The data were gathered using a self-assessment questionnaire before and after an introductory simulation. The results were highly positive, confirming many positive aspects of business simulation, among others, significant knowledge increase in the domains of business process and ERP transactions, and in the domain of technical knowledge for SAP ERP. The results confirmed that the introductory simulation is appropriate for introducing ERP concepts to newcomers, and, nevertheless, confirmed the positive impact on their intent on future course engagement.