Wednesday, February 1

SimWord of the Day: Scramble

Scramble: Using a mixture of reflex and practiced tactics in an attempt to get to a better, more strategic, situation.

I love watching people play real-time simulations. You can tell by watching their eyes when they go from being in control to suddenly loosing it. Things go wrong. They panic. They flail. Then, something happens to the eyes. They gain resolve. They scramble. And , sometimes, they regain control, and are once again humming at a strategic level.

I used to think that you don't really know another country until you are really bored there. Likewise, you don't really know what it is like to be an expert until you have to scramble with the content.

Pilots learn to scramble all of the time in a good flight simulator. Those few real-time business simulations likewise create atmospheres where they earn to think through the panic.

Students scramble all of the time, of course. But when history students scramble, it is around the school-context of preparing a homework paper, not the type of scrambling that a historical leader had to do at a critical time in their lives.

I know that some people will just not get this entry (and I worry I am one of them). Creating an atmosphere that encourages a content-specific scramble seems utterly bizarre when talking about traditional linear content, and completely natural in the next wave of educational simulations.

Part of the SimWord of the Day Series....

3 comments:

TheBunny said...

I think scrambling is the process of application. This is when the bits of information that were previously two dimensional (on the page or in the form of a lecture) has to become three dimensional so you can pick it up and use it.

Clark Aldrich said...

I think most people are familliar with the experience of scrambling at a high level.

But I think there is domain specific scrambling.
* Scrambling for dollars during a funding crunch is different than
* Scrambling for safety when a truck is cutting you off which is different than
* Scrambling to save a patient who is having a bad reaction to the medicine
* Scrambling to convince an army not to stage a coup.

Today, that scrambling, which I believe is critical for both understanding any professional skill and any historical figure is seldom part of a formal learning environment and hopefully will be someday.

Jane said...

When scrambling at high level there should be consideration of the grade (of climb) and whether or not to 'rope up' ..........