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Participants do not have to be experts in computing science. What they do require is knowledge of basic accounting, essentially, reading and understanding financial statements such as a Profit and Loss Statement and a Balance Sheet. They also need to study the Manual of the simulation which is actually a compressed course on the subject being simulated, as well as containing the rules and specifications of the simulated world. Together with the Manual, participants receive a very specific “history” of the company to be simulated depicting the results achieved by the past managers and, as in a case study, this one being dynamic, participants will have to analyse the situation left behind for them and react with a set of numerically expressed new decisions. These decisions are processed at a pre-specified date and thus participants cannot select decisions by trial-and-error, as in real time simulations, although they are stimulated to perform pro-forma calculations. They will have to commit themselves to a set of decisions from which they cannot return, just as in real life situations. Decision data are automatically fed to the mathematical models when the Professor in charge of the simulation enters, with a special password, the web page where the simulations reside. By selecting a few options, the Professor activates the computer programme, processes the decision data and produces results. Basically, the computer programme calculates what, in real business life, would have happened with that set of decisions..
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