Game—The Game of Thrones Quest for Optimality: A Role Playing Game for Teaching the Art of Linear Programming

Jeroen Beliën (), Liesje De Boeck (), Dries Goossens (), Nils-Hassan Quttineh () and Jens Vermeir ()
Additional contact information
Jeroen Beliën: Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Liesje De Boeck: Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Dries Goossens: Department of Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium; and Core lab CVAMO, FlandersMake@UGent, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Nils-Hassan Quttineh: Department of Mathematics, Linköping University, SE 581 83 Linköping, Sweden
Jens Vermeir: DHL Express, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

INFORMS Transactions on Education, 2025, vol. 25, issue 3, 250-256

Abstract: To stimulate practicing modeling skills, we develop an attractive educational team game embedded in an Excel spreadsheet. The game covers aspects of blending problems, production process problems, transportation problems, work scheduling problems, multiperiod production planning problems, and sensitivity analyses, all within a context that relates to a popular fictional theme, that is, Game of Thrones. The game can be used in an introductory linear programming (LP) course as an additional practice or repetition exercise. It can also be used to refresh students’ knowledge of LP modeling at the start of a subsequent integer programming or operations research course. Since 2016, the game has been used successfully in a first course on LP for undergraduate students following the Bachelor of Business Engineering program at KU Leuven (Belgium). Besides our positive experience, two formal student surveys revealed that most students (strongly) agreed that the game increased their interest in operations research. Furthermore, although only a few students watched Game of Thrones, most students liked the fictional theme.

Keywords: teaching modeling; classroom games; spreadsheet modeling; active learning; linear programming; sensitivity analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ited.2024.0080 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orited:v:25:y:2025:i:3:p:250-256

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in INFORMS Transactions on Education from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().