The purpose of The Production Game, affectionately known by students as The Game, is to teach the interactions between decisions and the resulting performance measures, such as inventory levels, resource levels, costs, and profits, for a production system. The Game, originally developed by Salwa Ammar and Ronald Wright at LeMoyne College, has been tailored and expanded to address learning objectives at Virginia Tech.

Historically, The Game was played manually with paper products, checks, and transactions, requiring substantial time and space resources for the classes of 200+ students. In Spring 2020, Kimberly Ellis and Natalie Cherbaka initiated an effort to digitize and improve The Game, collaborating with students Andrew Thomas, Matthew Garlington, Ben LaBine, and Melissa Tilashalski.

Implementing the digitized version of The Game successfully addressed the initial concern by reducing the resources necessary to execute; moreover, student learning benefited through iterative engagement, smaller team sizes, improved real-world scenarios, focus on team collaboration, and the reduction of tasks unrelated to learning outcomes.

In the fall of 2024, a group of undergraduate students, Maguire McMahon ('25), Sophia Yoon ('25), Timothy Yang ('25), Allison Hubbard ('27), and Makayla Wonbat ('25), alongside the aide of Dr. Cherbaka and Dr. Ellis embarked on improving the user experience of playing The Game digitally. The team created and conducted usability tests measuring both quantitative and qualitative data of the original UI alongside an improved and proposed UI.

The largest identifiable change was converting the ambigious colored parts and letter products into fruits and smoothies respectivelly. This helps users identify which parts go into which product without needing outside aide.

Below, see the usability test questions that were asked to 10 unique users with the previous user interface and the proposed one. Answers were graded and normalized to a scale of 0 to 1.