Game—The Game of Thrones Quest for Optimality: A Role Playing Game for Teaching the Art of Linear Programming

To stimulate practicing modeling skills, we develop an attractive educational team game embedded in an Excel spreadsheet. The game covers aspects of blending problems, production process problems, transportation problems, work scheduling problems, multiperiod production planning problems, and sensitivity analyses, all within a context that relates to a popular fictional theme, that is, Game of Thrones. The game can be used in an introductory linear programming (LP) course as an additional practice or repetition exercise. It can also be used to refresh students’ knowledge of LP modeling at the start of a subsequent integer programming or operations research course. Since 2016, the game has been used successfully in a first course on LP for undergraduate students following the Bachelor of Business Engineering program at KU Leuven (Belgium). Besides our positive experience, two formal student surveys revealed that most students (strongly) agreed that the game increased their interest in operations research. Furthermore, although only a few students watched Game of Thrones, most students liked the fictional theme. Supplemental Material: The “Game of Thrones: The Quest for Optimality” assignment file is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.2024.0080 . The Teaching Note and data and files are available at https://www.informs.org/Publications/Subscribe/Access-Restricted-Materials .