Having an effective method to help convince your customers that you have the solution to their learning problems is paramount to the success of a demonstration or pitch. You could be pitching to a potential customer, a line manager or other stakeholder and it’s your job to convince them that the simulation you want to create is the answer they’ve been looking for.
Sometimes though, the person you’re demonstrating to has no idea about immersive simulations, 3D virtual worlds or serious games and trying to explain the benefits of such things is often lost in translation – or is never translated at all. Breaking down these barriers can be a difficult obstacle to overcome and it is only through years of experience of being on the frontline of these obstacles that Caspian Learning’s instructional designers have developed a simple but effective methodology for solving this problem.
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It was an eventful July and some things we’re only getting round to writing about now. Here’s an excerpt from the Caspian Learning site about a Serious Games workshop that took place in Penang, Malaysia.
3d Simulation Software and Serious Games Authoring Tool, Thinking Worlds, plays its part in facilitating language learning and cultural development in 2 day workshop in Malaysia delivered by the Serious Games Institute.
You can read the full article from the Caspian Learning site.
For those of you using Thinking Worlds 3.3, we’ve just released a new patch that resolves a bug that crept into the HUD controls. The patch fixes a single bug, where HUD controls (images, buttons etc.) were not being hidden or shown correctly according to the defined scene logic.
The patch can be downloaded from the support section of the main Thinking Worlds website.
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After months of research and development, we’re almost ready to integrate our Java Web Publishing technology into Thinking Worlds. Chris mentioned it in an earlier post, but now, a month or so down the line and we feel like we are just about there.
At the moment, it’s our hope to get Java Deployment into Thinking Worlds v3.4, which originally had a release date of late September 2010 and so far, everything seems to be going to plan.
Publishing Thinking Worlds games as Java deployments will solve many corporate and military secure network problems where strict software restrictions are in place. Research has indicated that Java is already installed on 95% of the world’s computers which would make simulations created in Thinking Worlds and published to Java more accessible than ever before.
You can read the full, official Java deployment press release on the Caspian Learning website.
A recent study conducted by the UK Navy shows a marked improvement in new recruits’ performance after changing their traditional classroom-taught course to a course that included an immersive, 3d serious game. The study shows how the Maritime Warfare School took one of it’s historically worst performing courses and turned it into an immersive simulation. The simulation allowed new recruits to experience their roles as if they were actually on board the ship and the results revealed that recruits who took part in the simulation course reduced the need for additional training by almost 60%.
As you can imagine, a reduction in training requirements for a cohort of new navy recruits can reduce resource cost substantially in terms of both time and money. If the investment in serious games and performance simulations to deliver training modules is proven to facilitate real, monetary savings then perhaps the men who measure ROI so closely will start to support the introduction of more of these types of serious games courses into their training departments.
What better time to introduce effective cost saving measures that improve performance than in an age of austerity and pocket pinching!
For the full study on how the military’s introduction of a serious games course into their training schedules improved performance, take a look here.
I was doing the usual rounds earlier today and I stumbled across a game developed in Thinking Worlds on the web. Now I’ve not had any personal contact with the developer and I’m not sure any of our team have either but I do love to find games online that were made with our software. Enjoy!
Miska 3d Game
If you are the developer of this game, please feel free to drop us an email or post more about your simulation on our forums, we’d love to hear from you.
Junior high school students from not for profit organisation Schmahl Science Workshop, based in San Jose, California, are given a popular 3d serious games authoring tool to help them create their own 3d computer games.
Schmahl Science Workshop, the charity formed in 1996 to provide hands-on science activities for children in a free-form environment have been given the opportunity to add serious games development into the charity’s portfolio of practical activities for junior and senior high school students to take part in.
The Schmahl Science Workshop already count science and technology experiments and lessons including biology, chemistry, earth science, forensic science, mathematics and physics as part of their wide variety of hands on activites for children to take part in and now they can add serious games design into the mix too.
The charity, based in San Jose, California, were delighted to receive an email from international serious games and simulation company, Caspian Learning, who asked the workshop if they’d like to be the beneficiary of a donation of an educational licence to Caspian Learning’s award-winning 3d authoring tool, Thinking Worlds.
The idea behind the donation was that the children could use their practical experience in the workshop’s science experiments to put together creative 3d simulations that would support the practical exercises they were undertaking whilst improving their technical pc skills. It was an interesting and unusual use of the serious games software and it will be even more interesting to see what the classes put together.
Belinda Lowe-Schmahl, founder of the charity, was both surprised and grateful for the opportunity and was very keen to make the most of the offer and is encouraging her students to take advantage of the technology in order to put their creative hats to the test.
Development wise, the work on integration with VBS2 and thin client delivery via Java has been keeping us busy. The team are now focusing on upgrading core Thinking Worlds tool functionality, improving rendering with shader work and Inverse Kinematics which will transform how we animate humans in Thinking Worlds.
Project wise we are working on a number of new immersive simulation projects in May -
- A change management learning experience
- An educational finance game that will be delivered through Facebook
- Two different applications for Healthcare clients
Some work in progress screenshots below:
Delivering rich interactive 3D sims easily on to Corporate, Military and Educator networks has been a focus for Thinking Worlds since I can remember – its like the Holy Grail of Sims and Serious Games. Two years ago now, we shifted to thin client delivery using the Adobe Shockwave framework. This opened a whole new world of opportunity for us and users of Thinking Worlds. Suddenly, I could author a rich interactive learning experience quickly using Thinking Worlds, and with a click of a button, publish this as a SCORM object that could be delivered to learners wherever they maybe.
Now, we aim to take this another big step forward by enabling the option of publishing Thinking Worlds Sims through the Java framework. We have completed the first stage of work on this and it is looking good. We are now testing this functionality with clients that offer some of the toughest network conditions for suppliers – military, government and banking.
We demonstrated the functionality to military clients last week at the ITEC exhibition in London, as part of our joint venture with Bohemia Interactive and the VBS2 engine. Take a look at the work done so far – click on the image below. NOTE – please ignore the content, this was put together live at the show and my SME skills for military content are limited to say the least. When you run the sim, approach the soldier, then run along the side of the convoy to speak to civilians. When you receive a list of 4 options, choose the bottom one – that is triggered to blow, literally.
Next few weeks will see the results of the testing, plus the addition of SCORM functionality and also the option to publish as Java webstart aswell. Enjoy.
I have just got back from ITEC where it has been a great week. The big news for Thinking Worlds is our joint venture with Bohemia Interactive, the developers of the VBS2 engine. Through this joint venture we will enable interoperability between Thinking Worlds and VBS2, enabling VBS2 high fidelity mission rehearsal sims to benefit from rapid development technologies and thin client, browser based delivery. We have developed the first phase of the integration which showed VBS2 3D content being used in the Thinking Worlds authoring platform to create a scenario that was then deployed onto a server and accessed through the web browser.
Much more to come on this one. Here is the official press release to fill in the details:
“Bohemia Interactive and Caspian Learning announce a formal partnership which will help shape the future of the military simulation and serious games market.
Bohemia Interactive, the foremost military serious games organisation and Caspian Learning, the leading rapid simulation and serious games company are forging a formal partnership that will bring exciting new offerings to military markets around the world. Given the technology and heritage of both organisations, this strategic venture will herald new offerings to the military sector and help to solve current training and simulation issues experienced by defence customers.
Bohemia Interactive has been serving the military simulation community for almost a decade, and will bring its gold standard and industry leading simulation product “VBS2” to the partnership. VBS2 – Virtual Battlespace 2 – is a fully interactive, three-dimensional, PC-based synthetic environment specifically developed for military training, mission rehearsal and analysis.
Caspian Learning will bring its multi award winning and globally unique 3D simulation authoring software and engine, Thinking Worlds, to the partnership. Thinking Worlds will enable the strategic venture to capitalise on both the true thin client delivery mechanisms of Caspian’s core technology and the rapid simulation and scenario editing capabilities of the authoring interface.
The fusion of the current gold standard military serious games product – VBS2 – with the thin client and rapid development cycle of Thinking Worlds, will be a powerful and compelling proposition to defence clients around the world.”
Go here for full release
