Managing a Successful Educational Role-Playing Game

Abstract

Role-playing has been intensively implemented in many engineering courses, most of them related to computer ethics. Teacher’s familiarity with role-playing, pedagogical experience, as well as students’ valuable feedback determine the way of conducting the game. The effective accomplishment is based on strict managerial steps, which include: the definition of a meaningful task; planning of the whole process; announcement of the objectives, with guidelines and final goals of the game; its implementation through intensive online and in-class activities; their systematic evaluation; the delivery of the final outcome; and post-gaming activities. This paper presents these steps, making a framework of conducting role-playing in higher education. Activities are clarified based on examples of the advantages and drawbacks from the previous releases of the role-playing methodology. Due to the popularity of the approach and well established managerial steps, the course attracted more than 500 attendees this academic year, triple from previous years. New delivery of the course has again confirmed the scalability and the viability of the approach.