A serious game: Supply Chain Management and Logistics Simulator
Project Duration
2019-2020 and 2025-2026
Objective:
Improve the design and user interaction within a serious game
The final product
The online serious game is a simulator aimed at training industrial management students through the decision-making processes involved in the management of inventory from production to end-user sales. In the back-end, the game collects data on decisions made and profit-based rankings. At front-end, the game provides training sessions, different game levels and user rankings. The platform was designed as part of an educational service, together with introductory and skills development sessions.
The product’s goals were to increase quality of strictly rational decisions of users within a simulated environment. The purpose of the research was to improve the product and set a base for expanding sales into English and Spanish speaking European markets.
Challenges and achievements
- Although I benefited from the support of the entire team, it was difficult at times to explain the benefits of the qualitative methodology at the research onset.
The study included mixing user interviews and the results of a survey and pooling all the data into the decision trees for various types of use cases. All doubts disappeared when the results started to pour in and they found that, not only did they align with the problems previously identified by the team, but they also offered actionable solutions for them.
2. Another challenge was explaining personal data protection, ethical research practices to the team and providing technical solutions for respecting these standards, especially during the data processing and analysis.
Although every team member was familiar with the concepts and the importance of GDPR and ethical research, the implementation practices were subject to debate due to disciplinary differences. I organized special sessions for explaining these problems, their research and technical solutions and why they are so important. These needed to be re-iterated at various times during the research cycle. Each research-based development stage was followed by participatory strategic planning sessions for development and roadmap design, except the last one, which is under way.
