Sounds, layouts and Custom Interactions – Airport Security

In our experience the multisensory nature of Immersive Sims greatly helps with learner engagement and to increase their feeling of immersion within the learning context. Where used well, it may also generate richer learning stimuli that learners can encode and bind into memory more elaborately and thus retrieve more easily.

A key element of this is sound. Ambient sound can be used to found the scene in reality, whether it is the noise of traffic or the hum of machines in a factory. It can also be used to stimulate different moods, be it excitement or calm or horror. Then we have scene specific sounds such as a telephone ringing and of course, human communication.

Having spent a lot of time recently in airports and the security checks I thought that this would be a good context in which to explore sounds. At the same time we can have a look at changing default layouts and building custom interactions.

Branching and Random Nodes

A key strength of Immersive Sims and Serious Games lies in their non-linearity. The means by which a learner can engage in a scenario and practice different methods and decisions; take different paths and approaches to problems; fail and return again to reflect and try new tactics. Thus the ability to embed non-linearity into the learning flow facilitates motivation, replay and the variety of cognitive processing necessary for the development of more elaborate knowledge structures.

 

Authoring in Thinking Worlds there are three easy and rapid ways to create branching non-linear scenarios:

·         Branching Interaction

·         Freeform  Branch Interaction

·         Random Event Node

An author can create more complex, even sandbox like non-linearity in Thinking Worlds using the counters and arithmetic nodes and building state systems. However for the majority of eLearning developers the branching interactions and random nodes are enough to create scenarios that engage learners in challenging guided discovery.

Thinking Worlds

Lets get started.

Our player (Private Investigator) Cecil Clash and his faithful friend Alien Joe are hot on the tail of The Big Man – criminal kingpin of the city. The scene starts with the dynamic duo in a dimly lit corridor. An informer has told them that The Big Man is inside an apartment and up to no good.

 

Our branching scene will go something like this – bear with me.

Upcoming Expos

The launch of the Thinking Worlds authoring tool is but a few weeks away. I was over in Orlando last week showing the technology to folks at Defence Game Tech and the eLearning Guild annual gathering.

 

 

This week we are in London for Game Based Learning 2009 and next week the tool will be demonstrated in san Francisco at the Serious Game Summit – we have a presentation on Tuesday 24th of March in the afternoon. Come along to see Sims being built live and direct.

 

Look forward to catching up with people there.

paths and cameras

Online Educa Virtual Worlds and Serious Games

Just got back from Online Educa in Berlin. The snow and the wonderful Christmas decorations in Berlin lifted everyones spirits and I think contributed to a great show. Serious Games and Virtual Worlds were big features on the talk circuit – although less so in the exhibitors. Generation Y was the other big theme for me. Caspian gave two talks and our tech featured in a couple of others.

We were right next door to Second Life and Crisware which made us feel at home. We had our camera at the ready at the stand and in our talks. We asked a number of people about their thoughts on 2009 and what it held for Serious Games and Virtual Worlds for learning. Views included: more of the same; no uplift; focus on defence and public with budgets not affected by credit crunch; need for rapid development tools; scorm; and web delivery.

The videos are linked below – Clive Shepherd; Donald Clark; Adrian Hall (x DFES); Euan Mckenzie; Birgit Reiser (EU); Rolf Neilsen; SecondLife x 2. Enjoy.

The coming era of Rapid Sims

The eLearning world is alive with the buzz of Rapid elearning. Infact, with companies like Kineo and Line Communications in the UK making huge strides then this is more than a buzz – it is driving uptake.

 

A challenge for the nascent ILS sector is that ILS development is an unknown quantity for most would be buyers in the Organisational training market. High levels of uncertainty and possible anxiety exist around: what an ILS takes to develop; how much it will cost; how long it will take; how it can fit in to training and how long it will take.

 

The eLearning development market is aided by the wide availability of authoring tools that facilitate the rapid and flexible production of eLearning courses. For ILS to go mainstream a big part of the solution will be ‘Rapid Sims’ tools to simplify, speed up and extend the utility of ILS.