Text books are not really as exciting as they
could be especially for students raised in
an online world. Experiential learning on
the other hand because what you learn from
experience tends to stay with you. But how
can you offer such an experience to a large
class? Well we've come up with a solution.
It's called Playconomics and it's learning
by playing. Think of it as an ebook only ramified.
Playconomics essentially plays like a video
game but it also teaches like a normal economics
text book. It puts the student into a vibrant
simulated world, it's a vibrant world but
also academically accurate. I find the game
easy to connect with real-life situations,
the topics you're learning in the lectures,
as opposed to just learning the ideas from
the book. So to test the game we first ran
a lab experiment on one fully developed level
of Playconomics with amazing results. We then
presented Playconomics in class and after
only four weeks we had more 1300 games played
for a total of roughly 2000 hours of game
play which is something very special for content
like Playconomics that was not compulsory
at all. It's perfect for self education and
we really think it could change the way we
teach economics. As far as we know there is
nothing else like it on the market resembling
Playconomics and we're very proud of it.
