30 July 2021 we did a role play in the MBA sem 1 class, section B in Alliance School of Business, Bangalore, India.
According to wikipedia, Role-playing is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role.
Northern Illinois University has this explanation of role playing. Click here ..
Role playing is that allows students to immediately apply content as they are put in the role of a decision maker who must make a decision regarding a policy, resource allocation, or some other outcome. - serc.carleton.edu
Click here for my earlier writing on the Bloom's Taxonomy to effect great understanding in the learning process, Role play comes in the top create part of the pyramid.Objective : Understand how AI applications in daily rioutine activities in industry or elsewhere can help simplify matters and improve productivity
Procedure : There were 3 groups of 4 students each, the rest of the 45 students were taking online sessions from home. The 12 students carried out the role play.
The role we assumed in the class were of participants who earlier had issues with carrying out the mundane functions in the manufacturing plant or office or home and demonstrating how AI helped to efficiently carry it out.The first group showed how they had problems manufacturing computer displays in the shop floor. The manual processes were inefficient and resulted in errors which the quality manager often found and complained to the top management in the company. It was when they decided to call in an AI expert and succeeded in effectively shifting from manual control to AI based control, which saw high quality and increase in efficiency.
The second AI based role play involved the hostel mess where the students were bored with the same breakfast. Even after repeated complaining, the menu had not changed. That was when one of the students had a friend who was contacted and who helped come out with an AI program that helped to mix the right ingredients of different varieties of flour to get any food of their liking and preferences. It changed the students perception to the hostel mess food immediately and was a big success.
The third group focused on a retail store. Earlier the store had problems with low sales and the store management decided to install AI systems. This system tracked eye ball movements of customers that gave indicators to the store management what were the items customers were looking at which would move faster than the other items in the store. The store was able tom improve its sales by installing this system.
Learning : The exercise helped the students to visualise a poorly performing situation and the improved situation with the application of AI based systems that led to overall improvement.