Fashion management students measure up!

Keen to measure the impact of Business on the Move, Zoe Hinton of the Fashion Business School and London College of Fashion recently combined playing the game with a ‘Before & After’ survey conducted with her students.

Zoe is the Lecturer in Product Development and Buying at the Fashion Business School, part of the University of the Arts, London, and wished to provide her students with a practical and interactive approach to understanding the concept of distribution as part of their year 1 MSc and BSc Fashion Management degree.

It was also important to Zoe that her students on the different courses experienced “some bonding and integration” and “for them to have some fun!”

In November some 90 students, aged 18-25, played the new Global Edition of Business on the Move and the results of the survey are illustrated below.

It can be seen that virtually all aspects of players’ understanding of distribution improved significantly, notably supply chain concepts, coordinating elements of supply chains and managing finance and risk in business.

Zoe commented, “This experience enabled our students to more effectively understand an unfamiliar topic through a ‘hands-on’ approach. They had fun, they enjoyed the game, and their feedback was extremely positive.”

Originally developed as a learning resource for schools, one of the consistent, and yet originally unintended, features of playing Business on the Move has been its successful use in both training and higher education programmes.

The game’s appeal is the way in which players gain meaningful insights into the big picture of supply chains through an interactive board game that is both competitive and lots of fun. Learning is ‘incidental’ and yet very powerful.

The last word belongs to one of the participating students:

“The distribution workshop was great… the game format made understanding a topic that I am unfamiliar with easy. It was fun learning.”