In Recent Blog posts I have presented overviews of how the SAP UA brings SAP and ERP learning into the classroom.
Read them if you haven't and partner with us!
But anyone who has been using SAP for long enough knows it may not always be a fun and exciting topic,
I mean just look at the SAP GUI stock menu:
But we have found many ways to make learning about SAP and Enterprise Systems more fun.
Start with the ERPsim suite of games from the Fantastic Group at HEC Montreal. https://erpsim.hec.ca/
They make several games that make learning more fun.
In these simulation games students run a virtual business, in competition with other teams of students running their virtual companies.
This fosters active learning, which research has shown students learn and remember so much more that they actually do,
verses passively listening to boring lectures!
It also utilizes problem based learning, which is an even better active learning strategy for the classroom.
They have a series of games, from selling water, to selling and producing mueslix cereal, to the logistics of moving and selling your products,
to marketing, to profit margins, net income and more. All while learning how to use an enterprise system to run your business, and actually
having fun doing it.
They simplify the user menu for each game to get the students up and running faster, and makes learning the transactions so much easier!
They have also taken this educational product and have a corporate partner who can work with your organization to learn while playing
the games at Baton Siimulations http://batonsimulations.com/
But we don't stop with simulation games to have fun while learning enterprise systems, we also take part in competitions like Data Genius
https://ideas.sap.com/DataGenius
In the Data Genius competition students choose a type of data to analyze, and try out several tools to see what they can learn from the data.
Data from Health and social impacts, to sports to technology to science to business can be used, along with 5 different technologies:
You will find all kinds of interesting insights, fun and educational from the entrants:
With grand prize winners like these from 2016:
And other winners:
Check the Data Genius Site out and watch for the next round of competitions!
The Data Genius Team also holds numerous viz-a-thons where students and professionals can try their hand at analyzing some data
like this one held at SAP TechEd Las Vegas in 2015:
The data comes from a charity and the participants help the charity learn valuable insights from their data, again at TechEd Las Vegas 2015
the group was the Made in a Free World group, a worthy and fun cause:
The room was packed, fun was had all around, and more technologies were really learned by having fun and competing for a charity!
There are other fun ways to get students interacting with datasets and learning the power of data analysis like the annual March Madness
fun for college basketball fanatics like me:
You can find the annual updates to this fun in the SCN every March, and look at past years as well:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-53054
There is a lot you can learn about analyzing data when you can go crazy with the stats and visuals like you can with March Madness:
Of course predictive analytics about what 18-21 year olds will do in a game is hard (Virginia will not win it all this year
and neither will my Arizona Wildcats or Tammy Powlas's Jayhawks! Better luck next year!
The ASUG organization is another excellent source of education and they have fun too!
Take for example their Dashboard Developer Wars for Charity event at the Analytics and Business Objects Conference Each Fall:
Teams compete, once again with data from a charity or non-profit (for 2016 it was the Network for Teaching Entrepeneurship NFTE
http://www.nfte.com/ ) and fun is once again had as teams in outfits compete for the kings of Dashboards:
And yes that is Ingo up there in his finest Data Busters outfit, and their dashboards were amazing!
And as you can see in the last picture SAP UA students were on each team, learning, competing and having fun at the same time!
This year I will take a team of only students and we will beat the professionals at Developer Wars for Charity"
http://analytics.asug.com/asug-developer-wars
The SAP University Alliance is all about learning enterprise systems and creating the future workforce, but we can have fun at the same time!
I am taking a team of students from Georgia College to the University of Indiana Campus this weekend to compete in an ERPsim competition hosted by the
Association for Information Systems.
The ERPsim HEC Montreal https://erpsim.hec.ca/ group also hosts an international competition where some school gets to lay title to the term,
world champs of ERPsim, where else in the ecosystem can you be a world champ?
So if you want to learn about SAP, enterprise systems, and still have fun the SAP UA is a great place to start!
Contact me or any SAP UA school and see how you can partner with us, send your employees to us to take
classes, hire our students or just have some fun!
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