Short Sims

A Game Changer

Clark Aldrich

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367860660
• eBook ISBN: 9781000036350
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Short Sims: A Game Changer explores the design concepts, dialogue, and formatting of interactive simulations. Interactivity is the key to effective educational media in schools, corporations, the military, and government. However, challenges like ineffective linear content or expenses can derail the product. This book provides a proven methodology to guide anyone through the steps of quickly creating highly engaging and responsive content. The process combines decades of research and implementations with leading organizations (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Harvard Business School Publishing, Visa, State Department) with new tools that have just emerged.

Key Features

• This book provides numerous code examples to illustrate how to put the techniques into practice.
• It includes expanded introductions to mathematics fundamental to computer graphics and game development.
• Graphics and physics are covered in introductory overviews.

Author Bio

Clark Aldrich is an education technology thought leader—the author of six books and developer of patent and award-winning projects. He currently builds custom Short Sims for organizations using a revolutionary methodology he has pioneered, or helps them build their own, through www.shortsims.com. He is also the host of an audio series called Education X Media (www.edbymedia.com) about evolving pedagogy in academics, corporations, and the military. ? He has been called a "guru" by Fortune Magazine and a "maverick" by CNN. Aldrich and his work have been featured in hundreds of other sources, including CBS, ABC, The New York Times, USA Today, the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNET, Business 2.0, BusinessWeek, and U.S. News and World Report. He has written monthly columns for Training Magazine and Online Learning Magazine. Previously, he was the founder and former director of research for Gartner's e-learning coverage. Earlier in his career, he worked on special projects for Xerox' executive team. He also served for many years as the Governor's representative on the education task force Joint Committee on Educational Technology, volunteered on several non-profit organizations aimed at child advocacy, and has served on numerous boards. He earned from Brown University a degree in cognitive science (during which he also taught at a leading environmental education foundation). He grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and is the ninth great-grandson of Governors John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, first and second governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Captain Walter Neale, the first colonial governor of lower New Hampshire.

1

The Short Sim

A Game Changer

The Necessity of Interactivity

Sid Meier, legendary creator of the Civilization series, said: “A game is a series of interesting choices.”

This may be even more true of education.

There is a growing realization that significant interactivity in educational experiences is necessary for a successful learning program in more ways than we can count:

• Interactivity can allow the learner to experiment—and be creative, devious, or destructive—and see what happens.
• Interactivity can allow a learner to customize their experience, from engaging optional levels, to asking for more information only when needed, to choosing their preferred business or industry.
• Interactivity allows online role-plays, trying on different strategies and personalities.
• Interactivity allows the opportunity for participants to learn and deftly apply skills.
• And of course, interactivity can test a learner, to be sure—its current primary didactic use.

And because it gives learners control, even agency, interactivity can allow participants to develop conviction, a flexible and robust understanding of why a specific approach to a problem works, and often why their past behaviors or beliefs were not sufficient or successful.

Interactivity is more engaging than linear media and more time efficient. It helps learners to process and begin to own new information, not just cache it. Interactive media—including computer games—also engages new swaths of the target audiences, such as kinesthetic males, that have fallen through the cracks of most formal education programs.

On the other side of the coin, the act of creating interactive media changes the culture of the content producers. It shifts us from focusing on experts and top-down leadership to focusing on collaborating with the learners and considering their application of the knowledge.

From a pedagogical perspective, the more interactivity the better. Connecting user action with feedback has long been proven to be critical for most new neuron connections.¹

The necessity of interactivity is why educational simulations and serious games have evolved quickly over the last couple of decades. They have grown from visionary experiments to predictable tools used to support the leading strategies of organizations as diverse as the U.S. Army and global corporations. The research tells us that interactive experiences work, and they can scale the development of competency and conviction better than other approaches.

Definitions

• Simulations: Functioning models of something else, designed for accuracy and predictiveness
• Educational simulations: Abstracted simulations with additional framing content, designed to develop skills or understanding in a user (e.g., flight simulators).
• Serious games: Educational material with additional framing content designed to make the learning fun and/or addictive, or games with educational elements (e.g., game shows or SimCity).
• Gamification: The use of framing content designed to make any activity more like a game and/or addictive.
• Sims: Interactive educational experiences that include both educational simulations and serious games.
• Short Sims: A sim distilled to its educational essence in content, design, and production.

¹ Held, R., & Hein, A. (1963). Movement produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior. Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology, 56, 872–876.

The Barriers

However, game-like interactivity is expensive to build. It is time-consuming. This content typically is platform dependent.

The inherent open-endlessness of games also makes them too challenging to work into assessment situations. Just sufficiently playtesting them is almost impossible.

And the skill set necessary to produce them is getting increasingly rarefied and expensive. This also means that existing educational games are seldom updated.

These conditions have prevented interactive content from becoming integral to educational media. Many organizations have been tempted, but have held off, or have built just one.

It is reasonable to assume that educational sims that follow the development path of today’s computer games, even mobile apps, are not likely to currently grow beyond a niche until AI-augmented game programming becomes mainstream, which is at least eight years away.

The expectation of fully game-like experiences and lack of more focused examples has prevented highly creative individuals from being able to move ahead with interesting ideas. As a result, the most valuable part of sim design—re-imagining content with a “learning by doing” focus—has not been done in the scale needed and with the creativity needed.

A role-play Short Sim using a New Yorker cartoon style

Until Now

That has now changed.

My question of the past few years has been, can we as instructional designers and educational media producers—enabled by this new technology infrastructure—find the synergy between meaningful interactivity and cost-effectiveness that is necessary for broad adoption? Can we meet the needs of both learners and sponsors?

To this, the answer is, after hundreds of pilots, yes. The answer is a well-tested development process that produces Short Sims. The new Short Sim methodology, presented here, can finally spark a new broad generation of authors and consumers.

Short Sims are a revolutionary new form of educational content, and the results have already been transformative. They fill in the single most important gap in educational media, learning by doing, in a way that is compatible with current academic and corporate environments, infrastructures, and skill sets. Short Sims can be created in the same time frame as linear content, such as traditional case studies, with the same work effort. They can also be edited, updated, and calibrated quickly. This means, for example, that a client can commission an online course, and the developer can add in Short Sims without significantly altering the delivery schedule or the budget.

Just as the combination of word processors and access to great examples has enabled authors (and video cameras and the work of past auteurs enabled directors), so too is a new generation of interactive creators now freed up.

A Short Sim around the exploration of interesting system

Yes, But What Are Short Sims?

Short Sims are a new type of educational media—five to twelve minutes long—with few words and many decisions. They are streamlined online experiences made up of actions, goals, challenges, solutions, mistakes, and consequences. They tend to focus around a single subject area, and they can be embedded in traditional course material. They are intuitive to eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Author
• 1 The Short Sim: A Game Changer
• 2 Short Sim Example: Be a Hacker
• 3 Seven Short Sim Design Principles
• 4 Planning Assumptions and Expectations
• 5 Identify the Audience and Broad Topic Parameters
• 6 Research, Including Subject Matter Expert Interviews
• 7 Blocking Out a Simple Short Sim ⇨
• 8 Getting Feedback
• 9 Types of Short Sims
• 10 Coaches, Settings, and the Value of Efficiency
• 11 Examples of Inculcating New Ways of Thinking
• 12 On Levels
• 13 Case Study: Creating a Short Sim Lab on Demand Curves
• 14 Short Sim Example: Carpool (And Techniques to Align Behaviors in a Sim to Real-World Behaviors)
• 15 Introduction to Advanced Universal Techniques
• 16 Example: Learning Curves with Complex Topics
• 17 Role-Plays, from Simple to Complex
• 18 Example: Openish-Ended Labs Around Supply and Demand
• 19 Examples of Sandboxes and Other Exploration of Interesting Systems
• 20 Endings
• 21 Assessments and Measuring Learning and Engagement
• 22 Case Study: Creating a Simple Business Simulator
• 23 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Text Style Guide
• Appendix 2: Examples of Learning Goals and Program Goals
• Appendix 3: Broad List of Possible Subject Matter Expert Questions
• Appendix 4: Be a Hacker Walk-Through
• Appendix 5: Short Walk-Through of Visual Problem Identification
• Appendix 6: Simple Business Simulator Walk-Through
• Glossary
• Index