Board Games: IIM Udaipur’s new course making learning fun for management students

IIM Udaipur has introduced a 15-hour elective course, which involves learning management skills by playing ‘Board Games’.

"This course taught management concepts in such a way that everyone could grasp them and retain them forever. The debrief sessions are very helpful - being so interactive and relating to the games I have just played," says Priyanka one of the final-semester students of the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur (IIMU), while sharing the experience of learning through a newly introduced elective course called Management Games.

Management schools are always looking for new ways of imparting knowledge to students, going beyond traditional lecture or case study modes. One such experiment has been conducted at one of the second generation IIMs, IIM Udaipur. The institute has launched a 15-hour elective course, which involves learning management skills by playing ‘Board Games’.

The course is the brainchild of Professor Shobhit Aggarwal, who uses carefully curated board games followed by debriefing sessions, where the professor connects these board games to management learnings that students have already learned in the program.

Talking about the concept of the course, Prof Aggarwal says: “It's a very interesting and unique idea where students first play board games and to do well in these games they will require certain skills. If I am teaching a class on collaboration, I have chosen a board game which will require very good collaboration skills and students will have to do that well to win the game.”

Improving students' decision-making skills

The new elective course offered by IIM Udaipur has made learning fun. The course improves decision-making skills in real-time situations and focuses on several aspects like Integrative Negotiation; Critical Thinking; Collaboration and Efficient Resource Utilization.

Another student Palak Garg says: “MG (management games) was definitely one of the most unique courses I have had as a part of my MBA. Besides the learning, it was a lot of fun. I am glad to have opted for this course.”

The students who took the course are ecstatic. “I never imagined that I would be able to learn so much while having fun at the same time,” says Srikar Medisetti, a 2022 graduate from IIM Udaipur. “This course was exciting, insightful, fun-filled and still full of management learnings. Seldom do all these come together so beautifully” says Rohit Surendran, another student from the same class.

Board Games-Experiential Learning

“The board-game based pedagogy is a significant improvement over case studies, which has traditionally been the way that management schools use to get students to apply concepts”, says Prof Aggarwal. Both board games and case studies require students to analyze a situation, think about which concepts apply and then provide solutions. In board games, however, the students are the protagonists. They feel the tension of the situation and can hence relate to the problem better. They can see the outcomes of their decisions in real-time and learn from how the situation evolves organically based on their actions and those of their competitors. Handling the fallout from a risky move gone badly is far more instructive than being told the optimal path in a lecture mode.

The professor believes that the pedagogy of teaching through board games has exceptional benefits for the students and management schools. Since students are enjoying themselves, both their engagement levels and ability to retain the concepts discussed are higher. Mayank Mishra, another student in the course, clearly agrees when he says, “I bet I will retain the learnings from only this course in 20 years”.

In a traditional exam or a case study for any course, a student knows beforehand which management domain the solution will lie in. Here, the student has no prior bias. The concepts required to do well in a board game could be from any domain of management that the students have studied in the MBA program. The students must draw on all the concepts they have learnt. This simulates a real-world situation better as even in their professional life, they will face challenges which may be from any domain.

As mentioned earlier, the board games chosen for the course are carefully selected to cover a wide variety of situations, teaching concepts including integrative negotiation, critical thinking, collaboration, and efficient resource utilization.

“The learning in this course is individual-centric like any good experiential learning program must have”, says Prof Aggarwal. Every student in the course takes their decisions individually instead of as part of a larger team. This helps them understand their own innate biases and can restructure their thinking to become more effective managers. In the debrief sessions, Prof Aggarwal helps students examine the decisions they made during the game and learn how to apply their prior theoretical knowledge-base to these situations, and analogously to the real world.

Pioneering Pedagogy

Talking about his long experience of teaching B-school students through board games, Prof Aggarwal says: “My journey of teaching through board games started when I used them to teach classes at IIM Bangalore from 2011 till 2014 for their flagship two-year program.” He is especially proud of Kingpin, the board game and Negotiation training module he co-designed with his then partners. Kingpin has since been used for multiple corporate trainings.

The professor believes that this pedagogy will continue to grow in popularity in management schools. Later this year, he intends to broaden the scope to cover a wider set of concepts, expanding the course to 30 hours from 15 hours currently. Shorter, focused modules will also be available for corporates interested in honing specific employee skills.

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