Board Game as a Pedagogical Innovation for Learning Social Entrepreneurship*

Board Game as a Pedagogical Innovation for Learning Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship has gained importance in recent years with the Government of India making Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) compulsory for profit-making Indian companies. Consequently, social enterprises have also been in the limelight as organizations who do social good and who also help channelize CSR funds to the social sector.

Social enterprises have made their mark in society. In the United Kingdom, the number of social enterprises is estimated at 0.7 million with 2.1 million people engaged with them on full-time basis. The United States has more than 1.3 million social enterprises which engage more than 12.5 million people. India has 3.17 million registered social enterprises estimated to engage 83.3 million people.

There are few institutions in India which teach social enterprises and entrepreneurship. In the case of management education, Social Entrepreneurship is offered as an optional or elective course. The vast and specialized subject is covered in one course by giving an overview of the concepts and the nuances at the ground level. This is normally done by a combination of lectures, case studies and guest sessions by social entrepreneurs........

Design of the Board Game for Social Entrepreneurship

Use of serious games

Serious games are those that are designed with a purpose rather than pure entertainment. They have an educational and learning aspects attached to it and are not used just for entertainment purposes. They combine the elements of entertainment with defined educational objectives and are an effective learning tool for students who play and learn from them. Any game created for learning should have six dimensions of fantasy...........

Objectives of Masti:

The objectives of Masti are to enable the players:

• Learn how social enterprises function
• Reduce the time to understand social entrepreneurship
• ........

Goals for Players of Masti

Human life satisfaction and happiness is a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic goals.26 Intrinsic goals like personal growth, emotional intimacy and community service lead to higher life satisfaction, well-being and happiness, self-actualization and higher self-esteem. It also results in fewer experiences of depression, anxiety and general health problems. Extrinsic goals like financial success, physical attractiveness, social fame and/or popularity make people dependent on circumstances of time and society in which they live. This often detracts them from well-being over time.............

Design of the Boards

The three boards are designed with a common logic. Each board has 24 spaces comprising of three cycles of 8 spaces each for collecting pay or earning profit. The spaces depict real-life incidences for the respective board. A summary of the spaces and their total number of occurrences on the three boards are presented in Exhibit V. The spaces could have a static or a dynamic description, Exhibit VI. The dynamic descriptions represent a simulation of real-life happenings which are captured in a deck of Incident Cards. The Incident Cards are the Activity cards, the Event cards, the Expense cards, the Innovation cards, the Operations cards and the Opportunity cards............

Playing the board game

Masti is played with a dice, play tokens and play money. It is suggested that 4-5 people above the age of 15 years play the game together to extract good learning. At the start, the facilitator briefs the players on how to play the game and about the play target. Each player chooses the board to play on and selects the occupation they want to pursue to achieve their target, Exhibit VIII. The selected occupation decides the gross and net income of the player. Net income is the gross income less the fixed expenses. The occupation can be changed during play at specific instances i.e. if they exercise the option on a specific card............

Recognition for the Board Game, Masti

The Board Game was submitted in April 2014 as an entry to the ‘Re-Imagine Learning Challenge’ competition organised by Ashoka Changemakers and The Lego Foundation. The competition promotes the concept of play-to-learn to address the question: How can play transform learning to empower a generation of creative and engaged lifelong learners? In July 2014, Masti – A Life Simulation Game was named as a ‘Re-Imagine Learning Challenge Pacesetter’27 for its effort to transform the way the world learns. It joined a global network of ground-breaking projects that are making this dream a reality..........

Methodology for the Experiment

The objective of this experiment was to examine whether the Board Game, Masti, was an effective pedagogical tool for students to learn social entrepreneurship. An opportunity was presented with the management students of FLAME University, Pune (India)............

Results and discussion

The assessment results of the Experimental Group and the Control Group before the game play is presented in Exhibit XI. It was found that while there was no significant difference in the performance of the students in the Experimental Group and the Control Group before the game play, there was a significant difference in the performance of the students after the game play. The students in the Experimental Group performed better than the students in the Control Group after playing Masti..............

Way Forward

The response and educational value of Masti encourages one to consider making it available for more people to play it. This can be done by having multiple sets of the board game or by converting it from a board game to an online version.............

Assignment Questions

I. How are social enterprises different from a commercial business?
II. What are the qualities an entrepreneur should possess to make a social enterprise successful?
III. ............

Exhibits

Exhibit I: Role of Serious Games

Exhibit II: Student rating* on Learning from Some Pedagogical Tools

Exhibit III: Goals for Players of Masti

Exhibit IV: Layout of the Board Game, Masti

Exhibit V: Space Composition of the Boards with their Frequency

Exhibit VI: Types of Spaces on the Game Boards

Exhibit VII: Sample of Descriptions on the Incident Cards

Exhibit VIII: Occupations for the Board Game

Exhibit IX: Playing the Board Game, Masti

Exhibit X: Player Card

Exhibit XI: Analysis of student performance before playing Masti

Board Game as a Pedagogical Innovation for Learning Social Entrepreneurship

Synopsis

The course on Social Entrepreneurship is generally offered in the last term of the management programme when most students are already placed or have decided on their career options. Students focus on completing their course with a reasonable grade and less effort. They often opt for this course by a process of elimination instead of a process of selection. Consequently, the challenges for the faculty of the Social Entrepreneurship course are:

• To encapsulate the concepts and nuances in one course
• To keep the self-study and assignment components at a reasonable level
• To present the social sector as a possible career option (as an alternate to a job and a business)
• To make the subject interesting for the student

Students want to be away from lectures and are busy with many other activities. Learning by game play helps the student retain the salient points of the course. They also engage students, induce creative and divergent thinking, encourage collaborative problem solving, are an easy means for peer learning, overcome dips in concentration levels, function as creative ice breakers and are agents of innovation. Games often make the player learn more than what is intended.

Pedagogical Objectives

The objectives of the board game on social entrepreneurship (Masti) are to enable the players:

• Learn how social enterprises function
• Reduce the time to understand social entrepreneurship
• Create potential social entrepreneurs
• Use it as a guide on how to make a social enterprise successful

Masti encourages the players to see beyond the job and/or business and to consider being associated with a social enterprise or to become a social entrepreneur as a third career option. It also guides them on how to make a social enterprise successful.

Prerequisite Conceptual Understanding (PCU)/Before the Classroom Discussion

The prerequisite conceptual understanding of social entrepreneurship can be obtained from the mandatory reading of Chapters 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 from the book by D. Bornstein, How to change the world: Social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. In the Board Game, the learning of social entrepreneurship happens when the player plays on the social entrepreneurship board.

Assignment Questions

The following questions could be used in the debriefing session as a thought provoking tool for students to embed their learning:

I. How are social enterprises different from a commercial business?
II. What are the qualities an entrepreneur should possess to make a social enterprise successful?
III..........

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