Safety in the software


So what do simulations and games provide us that we can’t easily obtain using more traditional methods? First of all, they provide an environment in which it is safe to make mistakes. Flight simulators cost millions of pounds and you can bet that airlines don’t spend this money to entertain their staff. They know that a plane crashed in a simulator is one that has cost them no money and, more importantly, no lives. Similarly, if you’re the proud owner of a nuclear power plant or an oil rig in the North Sea, you’d rather that your employees practiced where they can both do no harm and come to no harm.

But you don’t have to own some exorbitantly expensive kit for simulations and games to make good business sense. E-learning developer Epic Group have made simulations for audiences as diverse as recruiters at British Telecom and futures traders at Shell. Another developer, Maxim (now integrated into KnowledgePool), created a simulation of the American Express credit card business in an imaginary country called Amexia. In each case, the benefits are similar – users of the software can experiment to their hearts’ content with different approaches to realistic problems, without risk of industrial tribunals, trading losses or business failure.

There’s an old joke about two strangers who meet up on the streets of Manhattan. One says to the other: “Excuse me, but how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The other thinks for a while, then offers the simple response: “Practice”. The simple, if sometimes unpalatable, truth is that nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished without hard work. Where so much training falls down is in the balance between theory and practice – there’s far too much of the former and only a token effort at the latter. The problem is that practice takes time and that there are so many facts, principles, procedures, rules and concepts to get across. The result? You cover the syllabus but learner behaviour does not change one iota. Who’s benefiting from this charade?

Simulations and games, when they’re well-designed, provide the opportunity for repetitive practice. The most popular programme in one learning centre back in the early 80s, was a typing tutor fashioned on Space Invaders. As menacing hordes of invaders attacked in the form of letters of the alphabet, your task was to type them out of the sky. The letters came quicker and in tougher combinations, and so your typing improved.

Of course, there’s no point in designing an exercise in which the poor learner makes the same mistakes over and over. Imagine a simple maths game, in which problems are generated at random. The game can be designed to diagnose the learner’s difficulties, point the learner to worked examples and explanations, and then create further problems that allow the learner to build their confidence with easy examples that gradually build in complexity.




E-Learning's Greatest Hits
E-learnings Greatest Hits
ISBN: 0954590406
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 198

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