INTRODUCTION

A permanent challenge in education, which transcends disciplinary aspects and different areas of knowledge, is associated with updating classroom methodologies and didactics in order to attain active learning and improve achievement of academic objectives (Motiejunaite & Žadeikaite, 2009).

According to the generalities of current higher education, teaching and learning are fulfilled when an adequate response by the student is verified based on an instruction model; thus, evaluation determines the accomplishment of minimum established standards and allows identifying stimuli or reinforcements that could be more effective (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). The development of teaching-learning activities and of serious game in the classroom enables students to develop working competences based on scenario simulation, case studies and multigrade environments (Abad et al., 2018).

This has driven didactic actions that foster an improvement of education’s communicative action, as well as the development of creativity, imagination, personality and innovation at cognitive, psychological and social levels (Von Graevenitz, Harhoff, & Weber, 2010).

Based on these actions and on its combination with information and communication technologies (ICT) tools, more complex and sophisticated schemes have been promoted, commonly known as didactic strategies, which are a set of methods and sequences intended to fulfill the teaching-learning goal, these comprise (in different proportions) master lectures, debate workshops and online forums, virtual classrooms, social networks, design or simulation programs and videogames; the application of these new models is currently becoming a trend (Lozano-Abad et al., 2019), stressing that the incorporation of didactic activities in the classroom helps students advance different abilities and strategies typical of each learning style or inclination used to consolidate learning (Ocampo et al., 2014).

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Active learning has two meanings, one in the field of education and another one in the computer context. The first one focuses on a series of didactic strategies that place students at the core of the educational process, encouraging them to be aware of their function in learning, thus creating a bond with knowledge and its application in real contexts (Christie & de Graaff, 2017). The second one concentrates on the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, which are capable of conducting creative search actions, verification, evaluation and storage of experiences (Settles, 2010). The first meaning will be considered for the purpose of this research.

Diverse initiatives have been applied in classrooms and reported in scientific literature; one of the aspects reported in the areas of accounting, finance and management has to do with the application of games in the training process (Bodnar & Clark, 2017).

The following are other emerging phenomena that intend to positively affect the teaching-learning process, which go hand in hand with the relevance acquired by ICT in different everyday aspects: the concept of microworlds explained by Mavrikis et al., (2008) and Marin et al., (2015); application of games (Xinogalos et al., 2015) and gamification (Villalustre & Del Moral, 2015), which converge towards meaningful learning, incorporating a space for simulated practice into the training process (in the case of microworlds and game application) and into schemes of stimulus and recognition to foster motivation (in the case of gamification) (Acevedo, 2019).

Serious or formative game is a category that clusters applications of game in training processes, these are applied not just in schools and universities but also in fields such as military training, health certifications and financial sector simulations, with the aim of improving personnel and teams’ dexterity in controlled environments. Methods have been designed to analyze and design serious game to evaluate its articulation with defined educational goals (Carvalho et al., 2015). Formative game has been addressed from different approaches, including cybernetic, to understand it as a controllable process targeting the expected curricular objectives (Westera, 2013).

According to Kark (2011), game and gamification have been key in the development of learning, which is used to attain desired results in students’ training processes with different educational levels; also, Pasin and Giroux (2011), through an implementation of a simulation game to manage operations, show that this type of strategies are more effective than traditional strategies, and enable the development of faster decision-making skills. In fields such as medicine in Europe (Garrido et al., 2018), there are conclusive findings concerning the use of unconventional methodologies, consequently, courses that follow online methodologies and multimedia activities increase the level of analysis and synthesis competences compared with the initial level (Florez-Romero, R. ; Castro-Martinez, J. A. ; Martelo Martinez, Fernando; Salazar-Montenegro, I. ; Camelo-Cabuya, 2019)

According to Sironi (2016), areas such as finance and its rising intersection with technology (Fintech), must steer educational entities towards the evolution of their academic processes, making adaptations aimed at ICT and creative strategies to encourage students. Also, authors such as Hamari, Huotari and Tolvanen (2015), stress the use of game to teach economic topics and its appeal with teachers and students (Norman-Acevedo, 2019). The aforementioned can be supported by the experiment conducted on students enrolled in the master’s degree of Economics at Universidad de Granada, the experiment implemented a gamification platform and it can be concluded that the use of game built up students’ motivation (Zamora & Aranda, 2017).

METHOD

This work has a qualitative approach, it arises from the results of a bibliometric study that applied a search equation in Scopus which identified traits of quantity, quality and structure of academic and scientific production in the topic of game-based learning in higher education programs, including the areas of accounting, finance and administration, taking place the last decade (2007-2018). The resulting information helped identify emerging didactic strategies referred by the Educational Innovation Observatory (Observatorio de Innovacion Educativa) at Tecnologico de Monterrey (Observatorio de Innovacion Educativa, 2017), and the search is expanded to other areas of knowledge, keeping the educational an engineering aspect associated with the design and development of serious game as extensive criteria, in order to identify the frequency with which these emerging didactic strategies are featured in journals and peer-reviewed events that have been approved by the scientific community.

With this in mind, the most relevant texts and the impact index are inquired into to describe aspects that standout, such as participants’ profile, scope, relationship with serious game, and finally, main challenges faced by each of these emerging didactic strategies that can be found in the literature’s review.

RESULTS

Bibliometry: the outcome of the bibliometric study shows that the increase of academic production pertaining this topic is significant, each year it increases by 10%, according to the trend. 816 records were featured in the 2007-2018 decade, this means that the interest in the topic is expanding and is consistent with the digital transformation processes occurring in other spheres such as technification, production and finance.

Works in the formats of papers amount to a fourth of the total production, while conference texts are predominant with over half of the indexed academic production, this means there is extensive interest in dissemination, mostly of documents that are reflexive and that are applied to specific contexts. In its majority, these works are written by two or three authors.

Moreover, the topic’s production is concentrated on developed countries, namely: United States, United Kingdom, China, Germany, Spain, Canada, the Netherlands, among others. Universities that have contributed eight or more papers on the topic throughout the last decade include: Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada; Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain; National Central University Taiwan, China; and CNRS Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France.

The most representative authors and papers throughout the decade, with over 100 citations, include: Proserpio and Gioia, with a review paper oriented towards teaching the generation of virtuality, a collaborative initiative between the Universities of Bocconi, Italy, and State, Pennsylvania, USA, which provides reference elements to design virtual objects and environments; it is cited by different authors as a guidebook to design learning activities (Proserpio & Gioia, 2007).

Trends:as part of this analysis, and considering the typology proposed by the Educational Innovation Observatory at Tecnologico de Monterrey (Observatorio de Innovación Educativa, 2017), some emerging didactic strategies are detected in the literature associated with game-based learning, pertaining academic communities that cluster around each topic in different countries and universities. These include: collaborative-based learning, challenge-based learning, adaptative learning, flipped learning, competency-based education, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), gamification and storytelling.

After the initiatives in these eight categories were classified, the aim was to identify the impact as per a reasonable share of its papers, number of citations, use and scope described by the most relevant authors in terms of applications and results. Three categories were defined based on this share:

Table 1.
Frequency with which the trends are featured
Source: compiled by the authors based on information obtained in Scopus, 2019.

Challenges: this description is a conceptual construction that is typical of results obtained in the bibliometric study; trends contain information related to: definition, association of each trend with the use of game, connection of each trend with economic sciences, the role of students and teachers, as well as trials in its implementation.

Table 2.
Methodology and challenges
Source: compiled by the authors, 2019.

CONCLUSIONS

Curricular and didactic update is a topic of exploratory interest for academia in diverse disciplinary areas, it has started coming out of the classrooms of education departments to become the responsibility of professions that need to undertake training processes’ streamlining. It is worth mentioning that interdisciplinarity is not possible if the areas fail to venture into the fields of other areas, with the genuine interest of enhancing training processes of their own competence or of intersecting disciplinary fields.

Current education makes an invitation to review methodological processes in order to encourage teachers to assume significant changes in their teaching processes, awarding students a leading role as they are fundamental part of their training process; inclusion of tools that differ from conventional learning eases the teaching process, allowing generations of the technological era to live meaningful experiences by strengthening their competences, specially their soft skills; with the aim of evolving skills such as self-control, collaborative work and communication, necessary to conduct independent work steered by a tutor in environments other than classrooms (Trujillo-Florez et al., 2019).

Gamification seems to be the strategy with the greatest scope and impact, due to its capacity of adaptation with other strategies and to the generation of mental processes that are based on graphic images that affix concepts in memory and relate to pleasant and fun memories deriving from the interaction with the game as social expression. Nevertheless, opinions by some authors and results of experiments with gamification as an educational tool subtract credibility to the process and drive dispersion among stakeholders (Daza-Orozco, 2015; Trujillo-Florez et al., 2018; Velandia Vargas et al., 2019).

Teaching-learning pedagogical tools will contribute to the academic process in areas such as finance, economics and administrative after content development may represent situations that can be replicated, decision-making and mathematical and statistical applications.

Despite the fact that this review focuses on the administrative and financial field, the application of these strategies is not discriminatory. An approach to generalization aimed at contributing to educational innovation is introduced from disparate views.

DISCUSSION

Although this document introduces some structures, these are not the only ones explored in the proposed educational areas and/or in other areas. Different schemes to foster efficiency and efficacy of global education and students’ accomplishment of basic competences have been researched. For instance, organizations of international cooperation, such as the OECD, lead the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Vaillant & Zidan, 2016), intended to measure students’ performance in different areas, which has driven an objective measurement model of all educational levels in some countries. Other local phenomena, such as Project-Based Learning, Prince and Felder (2006), work with methodological trends that can achieve successful results, and its variations such as Problem and Challenge-Based Learning, Hmelo (2004), which follow lessons and good practices learned in countries such as Finland, Singapore and South Korea. Other cases have implemented more subtle pedagogical innovations with less radicalness, such as curricular transformations in the reorganization of content that does not affect methodological nor evaluative models. Likewise, Pico et al. (2018) and Villa et al. (2020), present an important reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of using teaching-learning strategies, explaining the importance of framing challenges in contexts based on cultural ideas, and teacher training as the foundation to improve its scope. Also, a differentiation between the in-person campus and the digital campus has been suggested, as well as the training role of computing tools.

To further this paper, it is recommended to review other concepts associated with and validated in cases of specific study, which may add more tools to the construction of quality and adaptative education in diverse contexts.