Development and Stress Test of a New Serious Game for Food Operations and Supply Chain Management: Exploring Students’ Responses to Difficult Game Settings

Serious games (SGs) in engineering education are a proven topic, whose implementation has been significantly growing in the last decades. They are recognized as effective tools to teach and learn subjects like Operations and Supply Chain Management. The research on SGs, however, is primarily focused on displaying applications and teaching results of particular games to achieve given purposes. In this paper, we provide an exploratory research and a stress test of a new SG on a specific target group in the field of food operations and supply chain management. We provide an overview of the SG and detail its mechanics. Also, we explain how the mechanics has been implemented, by means of a set of parameters and indicators that better explain the roles available to players in the game. We conclude by reporting and discussing the results of a game session played by a class of Vocational Education and Training students under stress conditions generated by an accelerated game time.