Designed by ESCP, “Moving Tomorrow – An Intercultural Journey” has been very successful at teaching intercultural skills, it should be expanded to new programmes and further developments are planned with the help of the Intercultural Management chair’s partner: Renault.
A lot of students in the Master in Management and in two specialized Master programmes in Berlin have played the game so far and based on initial feedback, they have thoroughly enjoyed this new way of learning. On a Likert scale, they rated their interest for the game’s progress 4.4 (with 5 being the most possible), its attention-grabbing capability 4.5 and their enjoyment 4.3. “I had a similar course in my bachelor but only based on theory, here I learnt much more,” one of them said. Another one called it the most innovative course he had participated in. “A student asked if he could do the next episode at the end of class because he was curious to see what would happen next, and another one if there was a way he could finish the game because he couldn’t come when he was sick,” recounts Professor Marion Festing, who developed the educational game at the Renault Chair of Intercultural Management with PhD candidate Tobias Schumacher.
She explains the idea is to test it in more programmes this year, and to introduce it in Executive Education courses and on a larger scale during the 2019/2020 academic year.
The game itself has been developed some more with Renault’s help: the car manufacturer financed new episodes and Renault India manager Hubert Valois shared experiences that helped to develop the storyline of the game: the protagonist – Lucy - is sent to India to lead a new project: a start-up from Renault’s incubator needs her company’s technical & management expertise.
She gets to work with the members of her new team in order to develop a virtual reality application that allows users to explore a fantastical virtual world and generate electricity at the same time. How so? The users are equipped with an energy conversion system that transforms the kinetic energy generated by the user’s movements into electric energy.
Lucy’s main challenge throughout the game will be to solve the different conflicts arising from differences within the team related to culture as well as personality. But it doesn’t take long for Lucy to realize that there’s an even bigger challenge that needs to be addressed in order for the project to be successful.
Will she manage to do so? It depends… on the player.
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