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“I definitely learned how to conduct research – not only how to conduct research, but also how to display and format it in a scholarly article,” he commented. Maxwell, who was only in his 3rd Class year when the project began, said that the experience opened his eyes to how university-level research takes place. “When we took it to the conference, I think it appealed to people a lot more because we were actually trying to test it,” Simms commented. When Simms and Maxwell presented their work, they found widespread interest.
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In the end, the group that played the game with a lecture interspersed seemed to learn the most, as measured by scores on a pre-test and post-test. One group listened to a lecture on taxation, while another played the tax bingo game followed by a lecture and yet another played the tax bingo game with a lecture interspersed. Their quasi-experiment divided cadets into three groups. A real experiment requires random assignment.” “It was what we call a quasi-experiment, because we couldn’t randomly assign people to classrooms for the day. “It wasn’t a perfect experiment,” Simms noted. In the end, they simply “borrowed” classes of economics and business cadets who had never had coursework in taxation. Once the researchers had come up with their game structure and created the bingo cards, they had to find groups of cadets to test them on. “You come up with a research idea, and you take it to other knowledgeable people and they help make your research idea better,” said Simms. Sam Allen, Ph.D., professor of economic and business, helped with probability estimates as to how long it should take a player to win at bingo. That form of business was chosen, Simms explained, because many people form sole proprietorships if they earn money outside of a regular job, but the tax implications of this can be tricky.Īs they worked, Simms, Maxwell and Donahue sought help from others within the department of economics and business. As the name suggests, serious gaming is playing a game for a goal other than pure enjoyment.Īfter recruiting Maxwell and Jameson Donahue ’19 to join her, Simms went to work creating bingo cards with questions about sole proprietorships on them.
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“I was trying to come up with a way to teach people about taxes that would be less painful for them.”Īs she mulled her options for making the subject more appealing, Simms remembered a presentation she’d attended at Old Dominion University on serious gaming.
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“ really gave me their full engagement for most of the class, but when we actually looked at the tax forms, they struggled to stay focused,” she explained. Simms, who is now in her third year teaching accounting at VMI, explained that the inspiration for the game began when she was teaching a tax class. Simms and one of those cadets, Peter Maxwell ’21, presented a paper highlighting the results of their research at the American Accounting Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California, in August. Kathy Simms, assistant professor of economics and business, along with two cadets created a tax bingo game this past spring with the goal of helping cadets have fun while learning about the tax rules governing a sole proprietorship. But we all know there are certainties in life we just can’t avoid. It’s well established that no one likes paying taxes – and no one likes filling out tax forms, either.
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