Who Said Accounting Was Boring? Let´s Play Cards. The DAC Project

Abstract

Accounting is often regarded as an abstract -and hence, boring- subject by students, although it is strongly linked to real life. In this paper, an experimental activity is presented as a complementary tool to theoretical classes in the subject Introduction to Finance Accounting, taught in English at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). This article aims at showing the use of the DAC project as a methodology that will help foster the motivation of those students as well as their understanding of the basic accounting concepts. Using several traditional card games, the authors expect to create a user-friendly learning environment, where the students feel motivated towards their self-learning construction process and can, at the same time, become comfortable with the basic accounting concepts and terminology in a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) English subject. After a thorough revision of the literature on games being used for educational purposes, we explain how the DAC Project works in class, identify the main impacts on learning, analyse the outputs and reach some relevant conclusions. The main results of the literature consulted show that using cards in Higher Education produces significant improvement.