Evaluation of the Player's Performance in Entrepreneurship Serious Games

Introduction

The entrepreneurial university, a concept introduced by Etzkowitz (2013), describes the various changes that the university has undergone in its functions and reflects the active role in directly promoting the transfer of its research results and teaching methodologies. Higher education institutions have promoted the development of technology and knowledge transfer projects for society. The relationship with the industry has become more intense and, simultaneously, the role of the entrepreneur has become more important (Rybnicek & Königsgruber, 2019).

In the entrepreneurial university model, universities should promote the creation and development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem through the involvement of various entities (Etzkowitz, 2013; Hannon, 2013). This is aimed at stimulating the entrepreneurial culture among students and increasing their potential for success in the market. In this sense, support offices for entrepreneurship and innovation have emerged, including training and education actions related to entrepreneurship.

The European Commission argues that all students should have access to entrepreneurship education initiatives, which should be offered at all levels of education (CE, 2016). Baptista & Naia (2015) complement this vision by pointing out that in higher education entrepreneurship education is even more relevant as most of the students will go directly to the labor market. Additionally, the findings obtained by Matlay (2008) and Nabi et al. (2017) suggest that entrepreneurship education has a positive impact on the entrepreneurial mindset of young people, on their intention to start a new business, on their employability and also on their role in society.

According to Gerba (2012), education for entrepreneurship consists of an educational program that provides students with knowledge and skills that enable them to boost business success. Furthermore, this educational approach should also enable the development of students' entrepreneurial intentions (Hattab, 2014). However, many of the students who benefit from education in this area do not become entrepreneurs. However, as Raposo & Paço (2011) emphasizes, this training provides them with skills that enable them to be an asset in the labor market. Despite this, entrepreneurship is a difficult teaching topic. There are several ways to teach it, in addition to the traditional classroom approach. Therefore, other educational resources have emerged, such as business plan competitions, business workshops and serious games (Bellotti et al., 2012; Chandross & DeCourcy, 2018).

Serious games are considered powerful educational strategies that promote increased learning effectiveness, interest, motivation, and persistence of students (Prensky, 2007; Qian & Clark, 2016). Furthermore, due to their intrinsic characteristics, such as competition, challenge, and interaction, serious games can transform learning into an engaging and fun experience (Iten & Petko, 2014). Moreover, Bellotti et al. (2010) also highlight the role of serious games to reinforce or recover the skills that students need.

The activities with serious games also help the teacher to identify and diagnose some learning errors, attitudes, and difficulties of students (Trevathan et al., 2016). For this to be possible, serious games should include mechanisms for assessing the player's performance that include formative and summative elements. Formative assessment should be continuous and systematic and its main function is to obtain information on the development of learning, intending to adjust processes and strategies; while summative assessment focuses on the end of an education and learning process and has a classification function (Dixson & Worrell, 2016).