The Catalogue is Growing ...
Growth is a nonlinear process.
There has been a lot of movement on our website recently. We have added several new apps to the catalogue. Come check it out:
First, I have built a new version of my beer game. After playing it with 50+ Executive MBA students this weekend, I wanted to make a few updates. There is now a proper instructor sign-up system that requires registration; this has the advantage of showing only your own sessions. And there are lots of stability upgrades - for example, if students lose their wifi connection and submit orders, they are warned that they have lost their connection. I also added a tracker that tells students how many of their team members have already made decisions. That keeps things moving.
At first, I wanted to implement a constant 'heartbeat' between clients and the server in this game. This would ensure that instructors would always know who has a connection and who has been disconnected; however, this feature would have been costly, since it would have massively increased reads and writes on Firebase. I thus opted to have this feature only during session setup, and not continue a client heartbeat afterwards. The client will detect a lost connection if an order submission fails to reach the server. That's a lot more efficient. If you want to keep your apps running cost-effectively, avoid heartbeats. Lesson learned.
But there is so much more to share.
Vince Castillo shared his Supply Chain Wars app. It is a fun game you can play competitively in a global leaderboard or in a classroom setting. It contains elements of forecasting, inventory management, and purchasing. Lots of concepts for students to explore.
I also found this very interesting closed-loop supply chain game called EcoCEO, made by Saskia Manshoven. Thanks to Shuya Zhong for pointing it out to me. It is a board game conversion, which I am a big fan of. I have not played it yet, but it seems to be a very useful way to introduce closed-loop concepts.
Last but not least, some of Tinglong Dai's students programmed a really interesting process simulator and shared it for free. You can build different process maps, simulate them, and analyze capacity - great for classroom illustration and exploration.
Last but not least, I made many additions to the website. You can now like Apps and comment on them. I also added a setup guide for people who are new to vibe coding - it will help you get started.
