Mobile Gaming - A Serious Business!

This paper describes the design and development of a mobile serious game and discusses the outcomes of a prototype evaluation. The game augments a physical location to represent a virtual company. Players take the role of business consultants hired by this company to help it address its problems and ´interview´ virtual employees, obtaining information and physical artifacts, players must infer the problems behind the symptoms the company is facing, and offer change recommendations, utilizing higher level thinking skills. The game-like activities address issues common to business simulations by leveraging the contextual learning made possible by mobile devices and provide a context within which students bring their higher level thinking skills to bear on the problems presented by the game.