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About
At GETEC-FEA-USP (the lab of technology education in Accounting of University of Sao Paulo), headed by Professor Edgard Cornacchione, it was conducted a research to develop a serious game to teach Accounting History to undergraduate students. It's called DEBORAH Game, which stands for Double Entry Bookkeeping OR Accounting History.
DEBORAH Game comprises four historical periods (according the classification of Melis, 1950):
Ancient Accounting History: The player is a scribe in Mesopotamia, 3000 b.C. and has to register economic events in his clay tablet to earn bowls of barley. His goal is to get 10 bowls of barley before the time runs out. The student learns some symbols which were used by that time, among other educational objectives.
Medieval Accounting History: The player is in Florence, fourteenth century. His goal is to find the 7 elements which gave rise to double entry bookkeeping (according Littleton, 1927) and deliver them in their proper place.
Modern Accounting History: The player is a Steward in a monastery in Portugal, eighteenth century. In this game the system of charge and discharge is presented to the student. The goal is to choose the right person responsible for the transaction that is presented, and also the right accounting book (Oliveira e Brandão, 2010).
Contemporary Accounting History: The player is in the year 2050 to talk to Master Ruth, which will guide her through australian cities while give her "lessons" about accounting issues. It's based on Hines (1989) and provokes the reflexion about accounting neutrality.
Each game has a different mechanic (drag and drop, exploration, runner...) to pleasure various kinds of liking of the players. There are versions in English and Portuguese, both available to play online here.
The game was implemented in the Accounting History course of Coursera, which has more than 3k students enrolled in the first edition of the Accounting History course. The course is offered for free by University of Sao Paulo and can be acessed anywhere in the world - you just need to create an user at Coursera, with e-mail and password. The Accounting History course is five weeks long, and it's taught by Professor Edgard Cornacchione, Professor Alan Sangster, and some guest speakers from Brazil and Portugal. There are quizzes to answer every week, and DEBORAH Game is part of the weekly activities too.
The game is also being used in a undergraduate course of Accounting at a public college in Brazil. Each Friday the students play one of the games, and the student's feedback is positive. In a questionnaire about the use of the game in class, students marked that "the game stimulates the interest in the course", "it helps the learning process and makes class funny", "facilitates the understanding of primitive forms of accounting", "it helps to memorize the content" among other options.