Faculty in higher education increasingly belong to Gens X and Y, while their students primarily fall into younger Gens Z and Alpha, who demonstrate higher reliance on technology, shorter attention spans, and increasing preference for interactive learning models. To provide a learning environment that is more compatible with contemporary students’ learning preferences, faculty have increasingly implemented hands-on applications such as classroom games. We examine the effectiveness of an interactive, immersive game on student learning. This internally produced trade game has been adapted to address multiple concepts (e.g., immigration, trade barriers, and political conflict) in the context of an upper-division trade course. While this game had previously been used primarily to reinforce rather than introduce concepts, its most basic iteration can be used as an introductory tool. We have engaged introductory-level economics/business courses in the College of Business and the College of Agriculture to assess learning outcomes and student satisfaction from a variety of teaching methods. Participants were selected into lecture (face-to-face and online) or game treatments (randomly assigned of self-selected teams). Results indicate that, despite the majority preferring the game to lecture, the conventional face-to-face lecture demonstrates the largest improvement in student learning outcomes, though all methods exhibited net gains.

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CRediT Author Statement: Anthony R. Delmond: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Joey E. Mehlhorn: Conceptualization, Investigation, Project administration, Supervision; R. Shawn Nanney: Project administration; Writing – review & editing.