Educational Games on Procurement and Negotiation: Perspectives of Learning Effectiveness and Game Strategies

Most construction management courses comprise only lectures on procurement and negotiation; therefore, students lack practical experience. In this study, an educational game was developed to help students make procurement and negotiation decisions for procuring the steel required for construction projects. An experiment comprising a lecture, pretest, negotiation game, and posttest was conducted at three different universities with a total of 87 student participants. The study not only analyzed the learning effectiveness resulting from the inclusion of games in a traditional lecture setting, but also quantitatively examined the problems related to the strategies used by the players from different perspectives. The results revealed that the game increased the average test score by at least 20.16%, and a strong correlation was observed between the winners of the game and the students with high test scores. The strategies used by the winners were different from those used by the nonwinners. Compared with the nonwinners, the winners considered different factors that contributed to winning and were more conscious of the strategies they used during the game.