The use of business games as a learning tool to educate
administrators ispopular in undergraduate courses. The literature review shows that initially the publications about businessgames were merely explanatory. Then, they began to address teaching- learningrelationships provided by the experience, and more recently they startedto use the methodology as a business management laboratory. Numerousresearches have shown that business games can contribute to the learning ofparticipants. Business simulators can be classified as:
Specific: when they are focused on simulating the activities of a
specific area of a company such as marketing, finance and production. Among the main simulators of this type we have: Markstrat, Brandmaps, Marketplace, Shoes: A marketing game and Marketing Simulation, which are oriented to simulate marketing activities; Fingame: for the area of finance; Forad: focused on the area of international finance; Intopia: for international business; The Management / Accounting Simulation: for the accounting area. The benefits of business simulators are that they offer students and entrepreneurs an innovative way to:
Perfect your skills, apply strategic concepts, and evaluate strategies in
a current competitive environment Business Simulator as an Academic Instruction
The use of business simulators, increasingly widespread both in
academic education and business training, aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice in traditional education. With these tools, students can learn without danger of destroying real resources and with the extra benefit of being able to condense, in the time that lasts a university semester, processes that in the real world would take years to occur. Numerous researches have agreed that business simulators:
They allow the application of knowledge to the solution of problems.
They improve the transfer and retention of knowledge. They increase the understanding of abstract concepts and the motivation of the students. Level up; that is, they are more effective with those students who had a low pre-simulation performance. In conclusion Business simulators are tools that strengthen certain skills in students. Thus, these business games are new methods in the learning process that allow you to establish a simulated business environment so that students can put into practice knowledge about strategies as well as understand the relationships between different areas of business.