Peter Smith: Blog

As we move towards a new semester, Darl and I are pon­der­ing “When is the best time to rollover the sim­u­la­tion?“
In our “class”:http://www.thereflectivepractitioner.org/ps/archives/2004/03/08/mgmt_301, we use the busi­ness sim­u­la­tion “NetMike”:http://www.smartsims.com/ as a prac­tice field for our stu­dents. Typ­ic­ally we sim­u­late between seven and ten years. Each sim­u­lated year occurs when we _rollover_ the sim­u­la­tion to a new year.
In the past we have done the rollovers every Monday at mid-day or, altern­at­ively, at 4:00 on a Fri­day. Thus each sim­u­lated year takes a week in real time. The advant­ages of doing the rollover on a Monday is that it allows teams to meet over the week­end to make their decisions. How­ever, do we really want to encour­age stu­dents to work dur­ing the week­end? Are we faci­li­ti­at­ing bad habits? That is why we have also tried to have rollovers on a Fri­day, so that stu­dents are con­strained to stay within the *work­ing week*, so to speak.
On top of that, I sus­pect that when we have a Monday rollover, some stu­dents are being ‘coerced’ into work­ing at week­ends when they would rather not. I’d be inter­ested to hear from past and cur­rent stu­dents as to what their ‘take’ is on this issue.