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Educational Game on Cryptocurrency Investment: Using Microeconomic Decision-Making to Understand Macroeconomics Principles

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Abstract

Gamification is an effective strategy for motivating and engaging users, which is grounded in business, marketing, and management by designing games in nongame contexts. Gamifying education, which consists of the design and study of educational games, is an emerging trend. However, the existing classroom games for understanding macroeconomics have weak connections to the microfoundations of individual decision-making. We design an educational game on cryptocurrency investment for understanding macroeconomic concepts in microeconomic decisions. We contribute to the literature by designing game-based learning that engages students in understanding macroeconomics in incentivized individual investment decisions. Our game can be widely implemented in online, in-person, and hybrid classrooms. We also reflect on strategies for improving the user experience for future educational game implementations.

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Notes

  1. Qualtrics is a web-based software in which users can design surveys and collect answers without programming skills (Qualtrics, Provo, UT).

  2. We refer the readers to Jacobson et al. (2022) for a more comprehensive survey evaluating the effectiveness of different active learning techniques on different learning objectives.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Sarah Jacobson for her insightful comments. We thank Tianyu Wu for his assistance in delivering the reflection survey of the educational game. We also benefited from the comments of participants at the SciEcon Seminar Spring 2021. This research is supported by the Teaching and Assessment Grant and Faculty Community for Active Learning Program, Duke Kunshan University and National Science Foundation China for the project “Trust Mechanism Design on Blockchain: An Interdisciplinary Approach of Game Theory, Reinforcement Learning, and Human-AI Interactions,” where Luyao Zhang is the principal investigator. This research was approved by the Internal Review Board (IRB) at Duke Kunshan University. Jiasheng Zhu contributed to the research as an advisee of Prof. Luyao Zhang at Duke Kunshan University. Both Jiasheng Zhu and Luyao Zhang are also with SciEcon CIC, an NPO aiming at cultivating interdisciplinary research of both profound insights and practical impacts. We thank anonymous referees and editors at the Special Issue on Cryptocurrency of Eastern Economic Journal, one of the Palgrave Journals, part of Springer Nature for their professional and thoughtful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yale School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    J. Zhu

  2. Data Science Research Center & Social Science Division, Duke Kunshan University, Jiangshu, 215316, China

    L. Zhang

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  1. J. Zhu
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Zhu, J., Zhang, L. Educational Game on Cryptocurrency Investment: Using Microeconomic Decision-Making to Understand Macroeconomics Principles. Eastern Econ J 49, 262–272 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-023-00240-7

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