Simulations for education
Transitioning from student life to working life with cutting edge business simulations for education.
Simulations in education
Educational institutions have a key role in preparing students for working life
Our business simulations recreate a working business using game technology and experiential learning. Students meet real commercial scenarios and have to solve them together, which is how the problem solving and the soft skills that employers keep asking for actually get built.
Played in a classroom or entirely online, students run a virtual business on a realistic, interactive platform. They learn the commercial and teamworking skills by doing the job rather than by reading about it.
Benefits
What a cohort takes out of the day
Not a list of topics covered. These are the things students work out for themselves once they are running a business and the clock is going.
Business empathy
Silo thinking has consequences, and students meet them. They learn to see a problem coming from another part of the business before it lands on theirs.
Team collaboration
Teams work out quickly that the only way to win is together, which is a harder lesson to teach in a seminar than it is to arrange in a simulation.
Building trust
Trust between functions decides most of the result. Students feel the cost of withholding information rather than being told about it.
Systems thinking
Decisions get made with the whole organisation in view, because a good call in one function can still lose the round.
Common goals
Teams develop for themselves the strategy a business needs to stay agile and profitable, then watch it survive contact with the next round.
Learning outcomes
A working transition from student life to working life
Students experience the modern business world and leave with more clarity about what employment will ask of them. The simulation puts weight on the transferable skills they already have and rarely name: training, hard work, teamwork, leadership, goal orientation and motivation.
Confidence and commercial sense
- Commercial acumen: orientating students to the fundamentals of working in a business, in a safe space
- Confidence built by dealing with other people, staying motivated and taking the lead
- Stress management, so fears and anxieties get handled rather than avoided
- Business empathy, from experiencing the typical roles in a business and how they interrelate to create profit
Working across a whole business
- Breaking silos by experiencing the tensions that emerge between roles, and recognising how to work together to succeed
- The importance of communication, process and systems in a business
- The fundamental role and impact of cash flow, learned in a safe environment
- Real time learning through reflection, experience and improvement, then putting it straight into practice in the next round
Experiential learning: practice makes perfect
Experiential learning is the most effective way to change how an organisation thinks, sharpen judgement and create connections that hold. Recreating real business scenarios lets people learn by doing, and the engagement and emotional involvement that come with that are the reason it sticks.
It is also why students remember a round of the simulation six months later, when they have forgotten the lecture that covered the same ground.
26 weeks in 26 minutes
We challenge teams to find the strategy that delivers organisational success, in a few short hours.
The simulations are designed for groups of 5 to 15 people and divided into three to four rounds. Each round is 26 minutes and covers the equivalent of 26 weeks of trade. After each round, teams reflect and learn from what went wrong so the next one goes better.
What teachers, lecturers and programme leads say
Aston University has found simulations to be valuable teaching and learning tools. Immersive Edge’s serious business games are the best I have seen at simulating real-world pressure and learning by doing business management as a team.
When teachers say the students were “buzzing after it”, students asking for “just another round” and even colleagues saying it was “possibly the best thing they have been involved with”, I would say that is a successful day. 26 weeks trading in 26 minutes would put sweat on the forehead of many a Director!
The experience of cooperating in real time in two teams, competing to run a sustainable simulated business, by reaching the twin goals of making a profit and reducing CO2 emissions, was enthusiastically received by students.
The participants took a huge amount of learning out of the session. This was a fantastic opportunity for young people to be exposed to business learning in a unique and clearly immersive and exciting way.
How it runs
Three ways to engage
Most clients start with us in the room and change that once they know what they are looking at.
We run it for you
We facilitate the day and work with your people beforehand to understand what you are trying to find out.
You get the session and our reading of what happened in it.
Best for
Team diagnostics, leadership away days, pilots before a wider rollout
A partner runs it with you
Several organisational development and leadership consultancies deliver our simulations inside their own programmes.
If the day is one step in something longer, a partner can build it into the programme and carry the work on afterwards. We will suggest one who fits.
Best for
Leadership programmes, change initiatives, blended development
Your own people run it
Once you have seen a day run and want it across the organisation, we train your facilitators over two days.
You get the simulation and the capability to run it. What you do not get is us in the room, so the debrief becomes yours to make.
Best for
Organisation‑wide rollout, repeat cohorts, in‑house academies
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Ready to transform your business?
Unleash human potential through serious games and experiential learning. Our award-winning business simulations will transform your organisation.