Saturday, January 21

SimWord of the Day: The Ninth Paradox of Educational Simulations


The Ninth Paradox of Educaitonal Simulations states that a good educational simulation takes traditional linear training just to use.

2 comments:

Mark said...

I see where you are driving here but if we are talking about games in general (and I know ed sims are a subset and that may well be the critical factor - i.e. different results and goals are expected for ed sims) then the 'training' required to use one, lets say CIV, is really embedded in and around the gaming environment - you can take a tutorial, you can access context relevant performance support and whats more is that games are built on the idea that you probably won't learn everything you need to know the first time through.

Clark Aldrich said...

I believe both of the following statements are true for games representing either new genres or strong variations of old genres:

* The real learning is embedded in the game/simulation itself.
* There still needs to be a tutorial to save frusteration and get a player up and running effectively.

Thus the paradox!