SES Group
StudyTeaching2026

Operations Lab: 24 small games about operations

A portal of browser games where each game teaches one idea from operations management, plus one large closing project.

Open it live ↗

Role
Everything
Duration
2026, ongoing
Built with
React · TypeScript · Vite · Caddy
Status
Live, 24 games · 5 on the way

The problem

Operations management is taught in formulas. You can pass an inventory exam without ever having felt the trade-off between having too much and too little on the shelf.

And most teaching games can be gamed. If you can win by spending the entire budget, you have learned the wrong thing.

Approach

One concept per game, and a set of rules that hold for all of them: scoring is anchored so that naive play scores close to zero, and the optimal answer is never revealed before the player has locked in a decision.

Rule 1
One concept per game
Rule 2
Naive play scores near zero
Rule 3
The answer only after the decision

What is there

Twenty-four short games, each a few minutes long: the newsvendor, the bottleneck, the reorder point, the queue, overbooking, the learning curve and the rest. On top of them sits Aftershock, a five-stage closing project on disaster response where earlier choices constrain later ones, scored on five axes at once.

Everything is static and runs in the browser. No account, no server, and saved games stay in the player’s own browser.

Outcome

The portal is live at games.sesnas.com and grows whenever a topic from the degree turns out to be playable. Adding a game requires no infrastructure change.

What I learned

That a game which can be aced without understanding anything is worse than no game, because it confirms a wrong model. The scoring system is the actual teaching.

Play them.

Every game is freely available and needs no account.