The Anatomy of a Higher Education Simulation

In a higher education classroom, simulations typically unfold across three phases: introduction and preparation, gameplay, and debrief. Each phase plays a distinct role in shaping the student experience and determining how effectively learning objectives are achieved.

Preparing Students for Simulation Play

Simulation introductions can happen within the game, usually through a preparation section, or led by the faculty in class. Because the learning in a simulation occurs through play and interaction, most students prefer to move quickly through the introduction and preparation material.

When students prepare for a simulation they are doing three things:

• Learning the mechanics of how to play the simulation
• Acquiring background information and context
• Discovering how success will be measured in the game

Simulation Preparation: How to Play

Simulation gameplay usually opens with a summary page or dashboard that orients the students in the environment. The summary page can be used for navigation or for drilling down into detailed results. This dashboard may or may not be shown during the how to play section.

The how to play section shows how the simulation is going to run so that students know what to expect, including:

• Types of reports
• What kind of challenges will occur during play
• Objectives and goals for successful completion
• How to make decisions within the simulation
• How long to complete the simulation, both elapsed time and in-game time (e.g. weeks, months, or years)

Simulation Preparation: Background and Context

Good simulations start with an explanation of what role students will be playing in the simulation to give them necessary context.

For example, students may be playing the role of the new CEO of a company, or the leader of a mountain climbing expedition. The background information tells students what happened in the simulated world prior to them entering it, helping to explain the results they see when they begin to play. The background information can be presented as a video or a short written explanation. This historical information makes it easier for students to measure their relative success as the simulation advances.

Simulation Preparation: How Success is Measured

To ensure a simulation is engaging, students need a clear way to measure success–either against other players or against their effort or own previous runs. The criteria for success should be clearly stated in the simulation so students understand how to evaluate their performance and compare results over time or with classmates.

Success within a simulation can be defined in different ways, depending on the learning objective. For example:

• A single quantitative metric, such as cumulative profitability
  
  
• A composite score based on multiple performance measures
  
  
• Comparative results across teams or across repeated runs

Designing the Simulation Gameplay Experience

Simulation gameplay is the heart of the experience for students. As simulations have moved from novelty to a mainstream teaching approach, enjoyment no longer comes from simply “running a simulation.” It comes from how well the experience is designed.

Based on Forio’s decades of experience with simulation design for higher education, certain elements stand out as consistently ensuring the experience is more engaging for students:

• Opportunities for collaboration among players
  
  
• Meaningful competition between teams or cohorts
  
  
• A model that reflects the structure and constraints of a real organization
  
  
• Unexpected or surprising events that force students to adapt
  
  
• Built-in ways for participants to communicate and share information
  
  

These elements don’t add novelty, they create engagement by reinforcing decision-making, interaction, and realism in service of the learning objective.

Recent collaborations, such as Forio’s work with Wharton and Google Veo to integrate generative AI into simulation experiences, perfectly illustrate how simulation gameplay continues to evolve as expectations in higher education change.

Using Collaboration and Competition to Drive Student Engagement

Competition and collaboration can significantly increase student engagement in simulations. Multiplayer simulations may be collaborative, competitive, or both, often requiring students to communicate and negotiate with one another.

In the Harvard Business School Everest Teamwork and Leadership Simulation, for example, students assume different roles on a climbing team and must collaborate to achieve shared outcomes while also competing to meet individual goals. This interplay of cooperation and competition creates complex interpersonal dynamics that make the simulation engaging.

In other cases, multiplayer simulations intentionally limit interpersonal interaction. Even then, competition alone can sustain engagement. In a multiplayer economic pricing simulation developed at MIT, students select competitors from a virtual table and interact only through their in-game decisions. This design supports learning objectives around arm’s-length negotiation and repeated games, demonstrating that direct communication is not always necessary for engagement.

When aligned with the learning objective, both interaction-rich and interaction-limited multiplayer designs can be effective.

Single-Player Simulations and Flexible Use Cases

Single player simulation games are among the most popular formats for simulations because they provide the most flexibility and are easier to build than multiplayer games.

Single player simulations are flexible because they can be used synchronously–in a classroom– or asynchronously–assigned as homework. Students typically run the simulation on their own. The simulation provides the reports, data visualizations, and reactions to student decisions in the game.

Competition Within Single-Player Simulations

Simulations that are played asynchronously, in which students run their simulation as single players at different times and in different places, can still be competitive.

The most common way to achieve this is through leaderboards. Take a look at this leaderboard from a single player investment portfolio simulation that a Stanford professor developed with Forio.

In this investment portfolio simulation, students run the simulation multiple times on their own and select their best outcome to share across classes or universities. Rather than retaining scores from every student who has ever played, the leaderboard displays results from only the most recent 10 students.

Limiting the leaderboard to a small, rotating group increases engagement by making success feel attainable. When thousands of scores accumulate, only the most confident students expect to win. By contrast, a smaller leaderboard encourages students to rerun the simulation in an effort to improve their standing.

Managing Scenarios and Iteration

Simulations are often played multiple times, either by repeating the same game or by advancing through scenarios with increasing complexity. Repeated play helps students practice and learn the material, while progressively more challenging scenarios help sustain engagement. For each scenario, students must understand the objectives and any changes to the storyline.

Debriefing: Turning Simulation Results into Learning

Faculty typically review student results during and after simulation play, which requires convenient tools for debriefing. This preparation depends on results being centrally stored and easily aggregated, allowing instructors to analyze performance across individuals and the class as a whole.

Aggregated results can be used to surface patterns, compare outcomes, support in-class experiments, or even inform research. Modern simulations make this easier by automatically visualizing results in charts or slide-ready summaries, helping faculty focus discussion on insights rather than mechanics.

Effective Simulations Must Balance Student Engagement and Faculty Needs

Simulations are an interactive medium that go beyond traditional visual and auditory instruction. Because they are computational, responsive, and connected, simulations allow students to engage directly with complex systems rather than passively consuming information.

Designing simulations for higher education requires meeting the needs of both students and faculty.

• Students want clear goals, meaningful learning, and an experience that is engaging to play.
• Faculty need simulations with clear instructional objectives that are easy to facilitate and debrief. 

While simulation designs vary–from single-player to multiplayer, collaborative to competitive–successful simulations consistently balance engagement with clarity and instructional focus.