Didactic standards in the field of logistics are still far from being fully shaped today. Such a situation is quite a challenge for educators, but it also contains a certain positive potential. After all, it stimulates reflection on the didactics of logistics, which is still in statu nascendi, and thus fuels the discourse on the emerging visions of teaching within this field.
Alongside the above statement, it is worth making the specificity of teaching management knowledge in general the starting point for considerations on the didactic significance of the Beer Game, with a distinction for a strong pragmatic-normative orientation – yet with the simultaneous, and particularly unfavorable in this case, occurrence of significant limitations regarding the undertaking of initial practical challenges in the field of management. Logistics, contrary to the common understanding of its domain, is present among management staff burdened with responsibility for the success of an organization. It is merely manifested in activities at executive positions, implementing logistics guidelines, where logistics adepts are usually offered their first practical experiences. Although it is difficult to argue with the refusal to entrust novices with responsibility for logistics systems built with significant outlays, one cannot ignore the voices demanding practical education, which is particularly important and at the same time limited in the sphere of management.
The game as a didactic instrument
The idea of placing selected aspects of a modeled reality into the realities of a game is not new. Suffice it to mention chess games, which have enabled the conduct of bloodless “battles” for almost a millennium and a half. However, the didactic values of games were only fully appreciated in the 1960s, which saw the beginning of a wave of particular interest in their use in secondary and higher education. On the wave of the educational games boom, the Beer Game (Beer Distribution Game, also known as Production – Distribution Simulation, or simply Beer Game) was created, which is experiencing its second youth today thanks to the popularization of computers and the Internet.
A special branch of the development of computer representations of reality can be called educational simulations, to which group – alongside flight or defibrillation training simulators – the titular Beer Game also belongs. Their common feature is the exclusion of the risk that would accompany them in reality from involvement in simulated processes, whether in the form of endangering life, materials, equipment, or finally the functioning of the entire organization at the management level. It should be stated that simulators with stronger game characteristics represent a special didactic value, because their entertaining nature in itself constitutes a good basis for engaging in the mechanism of this type of training tool. This advantage manifests itself with varying intensity among many versions of the Beer Game.
Of course, there are plenty of computer games with simulation characteristics that can be pointed out today. However, few of them, in accordance with the theory of education, could be called truly didactic, even though they seem to faithfully reflect reality at first glance. This, however, is only the first of three criteria for the didactic nature of games, which Józef Bednarek rightly called substantive, alongside which he also indicated the methodical criterion, briefly referring to the attractiveness of the form, and the psychological one, “concerning the influence of the game on students’ interests and the possibility of adjusting the pace of work to individual needs”. The Beer Game meets all the above criteria. Firstly, it is a simulation with an academic pedigree, referring to the fundamental propositions of management science in the context of inter-organizational relations and systems dynamics, and rooted in the field of management education through decades of its application – there is little doubt about that. The problem of the methodical and psychological criteria, however, seems more complex when one takes into account that the Beer Game appears in many mutations and has already left university walls, finding favorable ground also in secondary schools and in training for management staff. Its various varieties will therefore meet these criteria to varying degrees in relation to different types of audience – which is presented in Table 2, briefly presenting selected online versions of the Beer Game.
As for the general didactic values of “beer class” games, going beyond the basic conditions of didactic significance, it can undoubtedly be stated that the Beer Distribution Game fits into the (perhaps not the newest, but still current) concept of multilateral education by Wincenty Okoń, allowing both for learning the regularities inscribed in it, one’s own behaviors in relation to simulated phenomena, and experiencing simulated processes and influencing them. The merit of the Beer Game is not limited to logistics planning, but reaches into mental dispositions resulting in the release of the Forrester effect, which should be consciously recognized during its implementation and linked to conclusions for the future.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 1/2012.