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Here's a tool educators can use to help their students learn and appreciate accounting.
One of the struggles in accounting education is getting students interested in the accounting field. In the real world, accountants are often at the center of multiple projects, working with all functions of the business to make important decisions. But sometimes the classroom experience can make accounting seem dull and boring.
Contributing to this dilemma is the gap between working through exercises in a textbook and solving real problems in a business.When given an assignment in the classroom, students can read the information provided, follow the specific directions, and solve the problem. But once students reach their first job, they quickly realize that they are now responsible for gathering, disseminating, and analyzing data to find answers that had seemed so straightforward in the classroom.
I teach the basics of budgeting to business students (sophomores through MBA candidates), so I've developed a classroom game to bring life into the process and motivate students to consider an accounting career. Business students are naturally competitive, and when given a prize such as extra credit, they quickly rise to the occasion of playing a classroom game.
After lecturing and practicing budgeting problems with my students, I realized that they could reproduce schedules and calculations, but they really didn't understand the budgeting process.Many a student would produce a master budget but would have made a simple mistake in the beginning of the process with their sales or production budget. Others attempted to start in the middle of the process without completing the necessary first steps.
To force the students to develop their budgets in order, yet provide them feedback on each step, I designed the Amazing Accounting Race. (It's a little like The Amazing Race on TV or maybe a treasure hunt.) Working in teams, students create a master budget, but they have to do this by putting together individual pieces of the budget by solving clues along the way. A team can't proceed to the next clue or "leg of the race" until it answers the current question successfully.
The Game
Here are the instructions I give my students as we get ready to start the game.
In a few minutes, you'll begin the...