learning about learning….

Serious Games and Simulations January 7, 2010

The following are highlights from an article by Clark Aldrich, Because You Can’t Learn to Ride a Bicycle from a Book.

Educational simulations are a broad genre of immersive learning simulations focused on increasing participants’ mastery level in the real world. They differ from computer games in that their goal is not to be fun for participants (although they do engender a level of engagement.)

- Branching stories require learners to make a series of decisions through a series of multiple choices to progress through an event (or story) that develops in different ways according to the choices each learner makes.
- Specifically, learners start with a briefing. They then advance to a first multiple-choice decision point, or branch. Based on the decision or action they make (such as “I’ll take the red pill” or “I’ll take the blue pill”), they see a scene that provides some feedback, advances the story, and then sets up another decision; learners continue making decisions until they reach either a successful or unsuccessful final state.

- This genre typically has learners try to impact three or four critical metrics (primary variables) indirectly by allocating finite resources (money, time, good will, swag) among competing categories over a series of turns or intervals.
- Learners get feedback on their decisions through graphs and charts. The entire simulation might continue for anywhere from three to 20 intervals. For example, the head of a not-for-profit organization might try to optimize the variables of funding and community impact by allocating each week’s working time among such categories as fundraising, creating new services, or sleeping.

- In interactive diagrams, the entire screen display becomes a living, organic visual diagram of key concepts, relationships, and patterns.
- Interactive diagrams are often used in school programs to show, for example, food webs or how Congress works.
- Content is heavily layered.
- Arrows and graphs typically pepper the display. Control buttons and throttles present options to players.
- Interactive diagrams themselves become a model and pedagogy to apply to real-life situations.

- With virtual products, a collection of simulation elements creates a high-fidelity, virtual model of a real-world item. Participants can play around with these items or test hypotheses regarding their behavior.

- In this type of educational simulation genre, participants engage a virtual product in an experience structured by tasks and goals to learn about using some real-world item to solve problems or complete products (rather than just to explore what it does).
- For example, a learner may have to repair a Geiger counter in three minutes or less to pass.
- In more complex virtual labs, with each subsequent level, a student may receive less and less helpful information, such as no longer having access to an X-ray view, or may have to face more complicated situations.

- Encourages participants to repeat actions in high-fidelity real-time (often 3D) situations until the skills become natural in the real-world counterpart.
- The flight simulator is an example.

- Using relatively common-place web technology, instructors can create scalable fictitious situations using multimedia repositories to explore. The elements can include emails, video interviews with CEO, presentations etc, all accessible through a common portal.
- Here’s the key: only certain links in the repository are available at the start of the role play. As it proceeds, new links open up based on different types of triggers, typically time and contacts.
- By accessing this type of space, consultants can learn enough to create recommendations, projects, and plans, even introducing fictitious characters to each other. The resulting products can then be evaluated by real humans for all sorts of projects – evacuation plans, new websites, IT infrastructure, and strategic plans.