Role-playing in the teaching of cost engineering

Abstract

Role-playing Game in Teaching Cost Engineering

Cost Engineering is one of the courses in the Industrial Engineering program at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali. Offered in the second year, it introduces students to organizational matters and provides them with both accounting and financial foundations. The course aims for students to appropriate concepts, principles, and methods of cost accounting to understand cost systems management in goods and services.

The program holds ABET international accreditation, and Cost Engineering is one of the courses that reports its results under this methodology. Systematic analysis of learning outcomes revealed recurring difficulties in classifying financial statement accounts, particularly in differentiating between assets and equity. To address this learning gap, a didactic strategy based on role-playing was designed, contextualizing economic transactions in everyday family scenarios to facilitate students' approach to accounting concepts.

In the game, students take on roles as members of different families who interact economically with each other and with financial institutions. Each family starts with a defined economic profile (income, properties, debts) and must document their transactions, finally calculating their assets, liabilities, and equity. The evaluation is carried out through a scoring system based on the accuracy of these calculations.

Implementation was conducted in two phases: an initial phase of four semesters with iterative adjustments to optimize implementation and improve students' understanding of instructions, followed by three semesters of standardized implementation to evaluate its impact (2024-1 to 2025-2). Results show that this experiential learning-centered playful strategy had a positive impact on understanding fundamental accounting concepts, according to reports from the 65 participating students. Through a survey applied before and after the game, students' perception regarding their level of understanding of key concepts in account classification and financial statement structure was validated. Additionally, exam results were compared between groups that played the game and those that did not, finding that the average grade was higher for groups that had participated in the game.

The results of this experience demonstrate that implementing playful strategies in teaching accounting and financial concepts can significantly improve the learning process. The role-playing game not only facilitated the understanding of abstract concepts by contextualizing them in everyday situations but also generated a measurable impact on students' academic performance. This experience suggests that incorporating active and experiential methodologies in engineering education can be particularly effective in courses traditionally approached from theoretical perspectives. The developed strategy has the potential to be adapted for other program courses that present similar challenges in the appropriation of fundamental concepts.