The Game Learner

Clark Aldrich is one of the best writers around on the use of simulations/games in education – I picked up two of his books over the break and am looking forward to diving into them soon.

He keeps a great blog which is organised into useful, practical sections focussing on different areas of simulation design and development.

His most recent post is particularly relevant to some work I’m doing at the moment with the Nursing folk here – it’s a list of 15 questions for subject matter experts.

These are the first three:

1. What situation that you experienced epitomized the subject matter? (This could be a real time meeting, or an event that took place over weeks, months, or years.) Were there multiple situations?
2. What were your available options? At each moment, what could you have done in that situation, and what might a naive or inexperienced person done? What did you end up doing?
3. Why would the naive approach fail? What would it not have taken into account?

We’re working on a pretty cool project at CIT now – developing models, practices and standards for using virtual worlds in the classroom, with a particular focus on the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector.

We are using Croquet, an open source platform which has been created with education in mind and hope to make effective use of the possibilities that game environments have to offer. We’ll be making a concerted push away from building 3D classrooms, which is a fine first step. I’m quite interested in drawing on the work of Fuchs and Eckermann, creators of Expositur (which I’ve mentioned here before) to make the most of the space that we will be developing.

This is the general Croquet promotional video which shows how awesome this can potentially be.

If you’re interested in finding out more or contributing, let me know and we’ll see what we can do.