LONGITUDINAL USE OF BUSINESS GAME FOR ICT LEARNING FOR STUDYING BUSINESS Irena Patasiene 1 , Martynas Patasius 1 , Rima Kregzdyte 2 1 Kaunas University of Technology (LITHUANIA) 2 Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LITHUANIA) Abstract The university graduates who are creative find it easier to adapt to the job market and are more useful to the society. Thus, universities should encourage of development of students’ creativity. We noticed that students using business game in each year become more creative compared with students who used business game only one or two times per study program. Longitudinal use of business game has allowed students to understand IT more deeply and has encouraged our students to design a new business game by themselves. Keywords: Business game, education, simulation, ICT, GIS. 1 INTRODUCTION The World Economic Forum [1] has identified complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity as the top three skills required in the nearest future. Content skills (which include ICT literacy and active learning), cognitive abilities (such as creativity and mathematical reasoning) and process skills (such as active listening and critical thinking) will be a growing part of the core skills requirements for many industries [1]. We have decided to explore the possibilities to use a business game “HARD NUT” (“Kietas Riešutas”) [2] in order to develop the creativity of the students. 2 METHODOLOGY In business game “HARD NUT” the students manage simulated enterprises producing boilers. Each period (simulating a year) they have to enter decisions concerning finance, production, marketing and sales (for example, amounts to be produced, selling prices, advertising expenses, dividends to be paid). They can try out different variants until the next period, when the market model distributes the sales to the enterprises. In each case the students get financial reports. They can also connect to the database of the game via ODBC. That is used in order to facilitate learning about ICT. The research was performed with Business administration bachelor students of Kaunas University of Technology. They entered university four years ago. For research the internet based business game Hard Nut was used in 4 modules: − Introduction to Business (first year); − Information Systems and Social Data Analysis (second year); − Business GIS (third year); − Simulation of business processes (forth year). In the first year the students get just the panoramic view of business modelling and do not concern themselves with technologies. During debriefings they use basic tools of MS Excel and pre-prepared software for financial ratios. In the second year the attention is turned towards databases. Students learn to create queries useful for business decision-making. That contrasts with conventional method when the students just do lab assignments without understanding their usefulness in business. Thus the students not only learn about finance and economics, possibilities of DBMS, but also understand the usefulness of queries. In the third year the students learn about data visualization, GIS (the database is supplemented with data about localization). Thus the students get the opportunity to remember the databases and to study the GIS and their uses. Proceedings of EDULEARN17 Conference 3rd-5th July 2017, Barcelona, Spain ISBN: 978-84-697-3777-4 6550