CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTS AND COMPUTER PROGRAMMING FOR LEARNING ABOUT ECONOMICS: THE CASE OF THE MOAI GAME

We report from an initiative to foster learning in economics. Our goal is that students develop explicit knowledge of economic decision processes and of haw such knowledge is developed. We have developed a game which is first played in the classroom; then each student has to develop methods representing his decision processes and program them in Java. The interaction of digital agents reveals how fit each student's methods are. The reflection-programming-simulating appears to be a rigorous way to generate knowledge of decision processes. We present the design and some preliminary findings, together with an outlook at the future steps.