Page 373 - The Handbook for Quality Management a Complete Guide to Operational Excellence

360 C o n t i n u o u s I m p r o v e m e n t C o n t r o l / V e r i f y S t a g e 361

Instructional games. An instructional game is an activity that is deliber-
ately designed to produce certain learning outcomes. Instructional games
incorporate five characteristics (Thiagarajan, 1996):

1. Conflict. Games specify a goal to be achieved and throw in obstacles
to its achievement. A game may involve competition among
players, or it may involve player cooperation to achieve a group
goal.
2. Control. Games are governed by rules that specify how to play the
game.
3. Closure. Games have an ending rule, which may be a time limit,
completion of a set of tasks, elimination of players from the game,
etc. Most effective instructional games use multiple criteria for
closure and permit different players or teams to win along different
dimensions.
4. Contrivance. Games contain elements, such as chance, to ensure
that the game retains a playful character and isn’t taken too
seriously.
5. Competency base. The game is designed to help players improve
their compe tencies in specific areas. Learning objectives range
from rote recall to complex problem-solving and may deal with
motor, informational, conceptual, inter personal, and affective
domains.
Simulation games. A simulation game contains the five characteristics
of instructional games, but in addition it includes a correspondence
between some aspect of the game and reality. Some examples of simula-
tion games that have been used in teaching quality concepts are:

• Senge’s “Beer Game” in The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990, pp. 26–53).
The beer game is designed to teach systems thinking.
• Deming’s funnel experiment. Boardman and Boardman (1990) provide
a detailed description of how to set up and conduct the funnel
experiment. The funnel experiment illustrates statistical thinking
and decision making.
• “The Card Drop Shop.” The card drop shop is a small enterprise that
has customers, a president, a supervisor, an inspector, a rework
operator, several line operators, and an accountant. There is only
one process: dropping playing cards onto a target on the floor. The
customer ideally wants all cards on the target but will accept the
product provided that the total deviation from the target is “not
too bad.” The customer also specifies that each card is to be held by
its center and dropped individually. Like the funnel experiment,

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