The Impact of Gamification on Entrepreneurial Intention in a Brazilian Technical Business School

ABSTRACT This paper aims to evaluate the impact of gamification as a practice of teaching entrepreneurship on the entrepreneurial intention. We applied the FishBanks simulation to entrepreneurship classes of a Brazilian technical business course at the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). We adopted as an identification strategy the use of the methods of difference-in-differences, combined with propensity score matching and quantile regression to investigate the impact of gamification on entrepreneurial intention of the students of a technical business course. The sample was composed of 191 students on a longitudinal panel of two periods, with 106 students in the treatment group and 85 students in the control group, totaling 382 observations. The results indicate a positive and statistically significant impact of the use of the business game on the entrepreneurial intention. Furthermore, we observed a higher impact of gamification in entrepreneurial intention of the students in the first quartile of the entrepreneurial intention.

摘要 本研究旨在评估作为创业教学实践的游戏化对创业意向的影响。研究团队在巴西北里奥格兰德联邦理工学院（IFRN）的商务技术专业创业课程中应用了FishBanks模拟教学方案。本研究采用双重差分法（difference-in-differences）结合倾向得分匹配（propensity score matching）与分位数回归（quantile regression）作为识别策略，以探究游戏化对商务技术专业学生创业意向的影响。本次研究的样本为两期纵向面板数据，涵盖191名学生，其中实验组106人、对照组85人，总计382条观测值。研究结果表明，该商务模拟游戏的应用对学生创业意向产生了正向且具有统计显著性的影响。此外，本研究还观察到，游戏化对创业意向处于第一四分位数区间的学生的创业意向提升效果更为显著。