Aboard game that calculates your potential to work in social entrepreneurship is now being used to teach pedagogy to management students in the city.

Designed by an associate professor of Flame University, the game’s main objective is to make students understand social enterprises easily, create potential social entrepreneurs and explore techniques for success therein. Creator Bharat Damani says he made the unique game to generate dialogue about giving back to society. While he began designing it in 2013, ‘Masti’ was implemented in his classroom only two years ago. After some of these students graduated, he also reviewed those who seemed to have benefited from the activity. Damani shared, “When measuring life achievements, one thinks about money, awards, recognition, health — no one talks about how much you give back to society. This game tries to change that perception in students, looking at social entrepreneurship as a career option.”

Management students usually pursue a well-paying job or business. Few embark on social enterprises, even though social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility are subjects they study. The new game encourages one to understand one’s own abilities to look out for society.

It comprises three boards, designed with a common logic. Each board has 24 spaces (three cycles of eight spaces each), for collecting pay or earning profit. The spaces depict real-life incidences — a summary of these spaces and their total number of occurrences on the three boards are presented in Table 3. The spaces could have a static or a dynamic description, representing a simulation of real-life happenings, captured in a deck of ‘incident cards’. These cards include categories like activity, event, expense, innovation, operations and opportunity. The player needs to achieve a target of giving back to society by using the cards in the game.

A Flame alumnus, Rohan Shah, who studied a bachelor in business administration (BBA), said, “The board game changed my perceptions. I am now based out pf Chennai and working in a catering business, but also attached to a trust run by my family, which houses 108 families. Apart from just giving them their basic needs, I am now also thinking of how to make them selfsustainable by encouraging them to work for some products. This game stimulates and encourages one to take up social work.” Another ex-BBA student, Dhwanil Shah, now settled in the US, said, “I am studying my Masters, but also attached to an initiative on environment and climate change. We work on minimising tree cutting and using recycled paper. When I was studying business, I was completely moneyminded. Later, the game changed my perception and sensitised me — I give it a lot of credit for my path today.”