Learning Through Playing and Designing Games: A Design Thinking Approach to Entrepreneurship Education
Creators: name: Gatti, Wilian
Publisher: name: Werklund School of Education
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: game-based learning
subject: gameplay
subject: game design
subject: design thinking
subject: entrepreneurship education
subject: Education
subject: Education--Business

description: In this manuscript-based dissertation, I examine the design thinking pedagogy in entrepreneurship education as mediated by game-based learning. My game-based learning perspective embraces gameplay and game design in an integrated activity using a board game. A board game named Entrepreneurial Thinking was designed for this research, simulating an industrial market and engaging learners in design thinking in entrepreneurship education. After playing the game, students were invited to redesign it, considering aspects they missed (e.g., game elements, business topics) or problems they wanted to fix in the game. The first manuscript targets the question, “How may a business game design activity shape the designer’s assumptions about entrepreneurship education?” I approached this question through my own design journey. I aimed to understand how the design of an educational game helped me to shape my assumptions about three issues in entrepreneurship education: what entrepreneurship education means, what should be taught, and how. This design journey led me to support the ideas that entrepreneurs are designers, that design thinking should be the primary underpinning of entrepreneurship education, and that game-based learning could mediate this process. This manuscript assumed an autoethnography approach that assisted me in my self-reflection about the messy process represented by a game design. Next, I focus on the question, “How do cognitive acts build design thinking reasoning during gameplay?” I examined a group of four young male classmates who played my game in a college located in Sao Paulo, Brazil. After one of the players arrived late to the gameplay and overcame all the established businesses to win, all players agreed that luck was the explanation for that performance and the most needed attribute of entrepreneurs. Despite the random mechanism embedded in the game, I offered an alternative conclusion that emerged from video and students' reports, analyses, and interviews. I unpacked the player’s effectuation approach to explaining his performance, describing how cognitive acts built the winner's design thinking reasoning to craft a winning strategy. I contrasted this performance with one of the players who restricted his possibilities due to his causation logic and design fixation to present how to avoid misinterpretations of luck as the main reason for entrepreneurs’ success. Finally, I presented a group of four male students performing a design activity with my game in a college in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I selected this case by considering its representativeness, typicality, and transparently observable topics, as well as technical issues related to video and audio recordings. I tackled the question, “How may learners build a cognitive perspective in design by engaging in game design?” Evidence from video and audio recordings of the design session, written reports, and interviews were collected to identify four cognitive acts that supported their design reasoning. The analysis reveals that due to the absence of a repertoire of previous design solutions, the students grounded their analogies in their sociocultural context, which reflects their social norms, educational setting, professional experiences, and worldviews. They also developed a method of reasoning based on several disciplines to support and enhance their analogies. This manuscript suggested that design thinking instruction in entrepreneurship education should prioritize students’ sociocultural context and multidisciplinary projects to develop students’ design perspectives by enlarging their sources of analogies given their lack of design experience. Two contributions emerge from this manuscript-based dissertation. First, an understanding of how cognitive acts are articulated to form an effectuation logic in entrepreneurship is offered. Second, unlike traditional instruction, the experience of learning with games touches the emotional or affective dimension of engagement since it is experiential, immersive, and interactive. Furthermore, this work provided evidence that games can mediate not just fun and engaging learning experiences in entrepreneurship education, but also design thinking, storytelling, forecasting, scenario development, systems thinking, and critical thinking.