Learning Technologies – Rapid Sims Demonstration

I’ll be in London on 28th and 29th of January at Learning technologies 2009. I’ll be on the Caspian Learning stand (85) where we will be giving live demonstrations of the Thinking Worlds authoring tool.

Thinking Worlds enables designers, SME’s, trainers, ID’s and teachers to rapidly create 3D Immersive Simulations and Serious Games without any programming! The tool massively reduces the complexity of creating Immersive Sims and puts the power into the hands of the trainers, designers and content experts. Using simple templates, drag and drop 3D and flow diagrams a designer can rapidly create complex scenarios and games.

Come along to Stand 85 at Learning Technologies for a demo. You can build your own Sims and publish to the web live from the exhibition ready for users to play through the browser. See below for more screen shots.

Rapid Sims – A case study

What does this motley crew have to do with Rapid Sims? This is the Caspian team picking up an award for best learning game and simulation at the eLearning awards in London.

The award was presented for work on The Rome Game – a game that takes players back in time to ancient Rome where in their role as a futuristic Time Knight they must solve mysteries to protec the integrity of time from those that would change it.

This was our first game developed with our authoring tool Thinking Worlds 3.0. This enabled a very complex game with 48 different scenarios, 20+worlds and hundreds of historical characters and artefacts to be delivered end to end in six months. I’ll publish some examples of TW3.0 in a bit but for now I’ll share the award submission document as a case study.

Virtual Worlds….. Big Business

This is a short article i wrote for a UK newspaper. Linked to issues of browser based 3D games it discusses what I see as converging forces within Virtual Worlds, Casual Games and Social Networking. The winners will win big.

FREGGERS, Weemee, Minilife, Maple Story and Habo Hotel. They’re peculiar names, but potentially society-changing tools for a whole generation of young people – and they’re very big business.

Browser based Serious Games

Serious Games or Immersive Learning Sims – hmmm, a different post topic I think. Anyway, one of the big barriers to widespread use of Serious Games in training and education is technology. The good news is that PC hardware in organisations and schools is improving rapidly in terms of processing speed and graphics capability (but its rarely purchased with 3D gaming in mind). The bigger obstacle now is the need to deploy via a web browser and LMS standards:

1) Clients require easy deployment and updating from a central point

2) No use of exe’s for security – a big No Go for many organisations

3) Must integrate within LMS and be run with other learning objects

4) Central performance information capture and management

5) Bandwidth restrictions on amount of data transfer

 

All of which can pose a bit of a problem if your trying to run Halo3 or even Second Life on the corporate network. 3D games engines are typically not built with these constraints in mind. From my own work in Caspian I’d say two or three years ago this was less of an issue. We were dealing with early adopters who were prepared to overcome these concerns in order to get high fidelity Sims into their learning. Over the last 12 months SG have moved towards the mainstream and I’d say 90% of requests we see require web delivery.

The good news is that SG suppliers have adapted to this need. So, what are the options in the Serious Games space?