So I am always on the look out for new ideas. So how about this from Korea. Simulated death!

Just about all of us at some time or other will have said “life is too short” or you won’t worry about such and such issue when your on your deathbed. The rationale being that this wonderful experience that is life will soon be over and so why do we continually worry about things, like most work issues, which in the grand scheme of things are unimportant. In near death experiences it is often said that our life flashes before us, and people who experience these often do change much in their lives and change direction afterwards. So, death or the threat of death apears to be a powerful learning stimuli for inducing behaviour and attitude change. Stay with me.

So reading Leo Lewis’ column in The Times of London he recounts the latest ’self discovery’ fad overtaking the great and good in Korean society - fake death. It seems as though an innovate entrepeneur has set up a  simulated death service where a punter writes letters of farewell, settles up their worldly accounts with relatives, friends and business associates. Then attends their own funeral service, suited and booted with all of their family and friends. A eulogy is read reflecting upon their life, music, flowers, crying, the whole thing. Then at the end of the service, you get into your coffin, which has been specially made. It is closed up, nailed down, and there you are; alone, in the blackness and claustrophobia of your final resting place. Being nailed into a small box is probably enough to send most people over the edge, but you arrive here after an elaborate process of simulated mourning, I am trying not to be cynical anit touchy feely English, but maybe it could produce profound change.

On a smaller scale, I once attended a training session where an over enthusiastic trainer presented us with the ‘take the blue pill or the red pill’ - the Neo choice from the film The Matrix. It was great in the film, but did not quite work for us cynical Bankers. It may work better in these days of Financial crises.

I can imagine this taking off in classroom training. We all will have a list of contenders we’d like to put through the simulated death course.

Heres Neo, take the Blue Pill Neo……….. Doh!

The red pill, or blue pill from Chris Messina on Vimeo.

The Show for Sims

Starting with Caspian. See below for an interview with Graeme Duncan, the Caspian CEO, on the stand.

There was also a great talk by Scott Hewitt from Real Projects. This was very well attended and Scott took us through the nuts and bolts of actually producing Sims and Serious Games. The talk did not hold back, delving into the costs, timeframes and skills requirements for different sims developments. Many different sim types and options were highlighted ranging from Flash, to mobile to Wii to, of course, Thinking Worlds. Scott demo’d real projects (pun) that they had delivered and talked through nuances and decisions in their design, such as when and where to utilise a ‘hidden object’ approach.

Kevin Corti and the team at Pixelearning had a stand. Kevin walked me through a multiplayer leadership game that the Pixel team had just developed for a large corporate. I loved it. Very innovative design, using real game mechanics and social elements to effectively target leadership skills. It takes best practice from games such as Myst and I even saw a bit of Zelda in there, not to mention, puxxle mechanics from The Crystal Maze. Fantastic job - take a look for yourself:

Aswell as this I saw some great Flash work being developed by Tata Interactive and also KTM from France. All in all, a great experience. Less hype and fluff around sims, but much more in the way of substance. Long may it continue.

See Thinking Worlds live in London

Brian Bishop, Graeme Duncan and myself will be demonstrating Thinking Worlds, including real client projects. So, if you want to know how to rapidly author 3D simulations and serious games then come along and see us.

One of the researchers describes the findings:

The researchers found that players who had a larger nucleus accumbens did better than their counterparts in the early stages of the training period, regardless of their training group. This makes sense, Erickson said, because the nucleus accumbens is part of the brain’s reward center, and a person’s motivation for excelling at a video game includes the pleasure that results from achieving a specific goal. This sense of achievement and the emotional reward that accompanies it is likely highest in the earliest stages of learning, he said.

Players with a larger caudate nucleus and putamen did best on the variable priority training.

“The putamen and the caudate have been implicated in learning procedures, learning new skills, and those nuclei predicted learning throughout the 20-hour period,” Kramer said. The players in which those structures were largest “learned more quickly and learned more over the training period,” he said.

So far, impressive. OK - lets take a look at this game……

was this study done in 1983?

Hmm, thats not what I had in mind when I read the headline. ok. I am a little underwhelmed. Is that fair?

The researchers claim that the ‘variable priority training’ method used in one of the conditions encourages flexibility in decision making - that can be transferred to skills in everyday life. When I think about the complexity of movement, judgement and social skills utilised in many modern online console games, then this rather simple task seems trivial. I’d like to see a study conducted in modern rich 3D environments which are more simulative of human behaviour and context to see the results.

Further to this then obvious extensions of the study are to examine brain changes over time. So does repeated practice on the variable priority training task enhance performance and does this show up in the brain measurements.

Then considering other genres of games. One would hypothesise that reflective strategy games such as Civilisation, or creative games such as Little Big Planet would engage different cognitive skills and thus show different effects.

Well, forget about distracted teenagers, not only are we struggling with a myriad of different information streams, but we oldies become more easily distracted. On the positive side, as we get older we get better at recognising patterns and seeing the big picture:

“The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.”

As we get older we have (hopefully) acquired deep and complex knowledge structures on many topics. What are the best ways to change these knowledge structures, adding new pathways, updating old knowledge and linking to new developments?

” Jiggle those synapses” - love this description. We are going to adopt that term in parts our our Sim design workshops.

“Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young.”

Now we are getting into familiar territory for Sim designers. In every design workshop we run we include two elements that embed this approach into the Sim concept - Safe Failure and The Twist.

Safe Failure is an old favourite that we have covered extensively - allowing learners to make mistakes, sometimes multiple, compounded and even catastophic errors are a liberating learning mechanism in sims. They shock learners into reflection and questionning their approach - IF, importantly, the sim provides ample feedback mechanisms and guidance to support the learner in this reflection process.

The Twist - as humans are default setting is to go with the flow. For instance we naturally look for and filter information that supports our hypotheses and will make us ‘look good’ and support our self esteem. Unless prompted, we will rarely challenge our assumptions and be happy to go with what works or appears to work for now. The work of behavioural economists and psychology provides a wealth of manipulations that show how vulnerable we are to these ways of thinking. In The Twist, we take our Cognitive Training Needs Analysis and Concept Outline and we look at the assumptions underlying key decisions and actions. Then, we try and twist them. These can range from the simple:

* the utensils in the kitchen are not in the usual places

* In the car showroom the family with 3 kids are committed environmentalists and want a small car

To the more significant:

* A high % of borrowers can default on sub prime loans

* A topical example in the UK right now, would be an assumption that it cannot snow for four weeks unbroken

We use these techniques whenever we are building Performance Simulations for any learners - sims where a body of complex applied knowledge and skills must be acquired over time.

Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma”.

I think Jacks right - go jiggle those synapses, let your learners fail and give your design a twist.

Executive Producer Guillaume de Fondaumiere

Researchers at the University of California asked: Can 20 hours of game-playing improve children’s cognitive skills? - I would hope so!!

The specific games were - “For the Nintendo DS, the puzzle video game “Picross” and “Big Brain Academy,” and for the PC, the puzzle game “Azada” and the mind-challenging “Chocolate Fix”. If they chose Duke Nukem I’d wager my Christmas Stocking that the results would have been different - excuse the sarcasm, I’m not being dismissive of the study, its a good study as I’ll discuss, but this debate on Serious Games and the use of commercial off the shelf games (COTS) seems to have gone on for most of this decade. This study used games that clearly embedded learning methods and cognitive tools into the gameplay design. So, regardless of them being ‘games’, to anyone skilled in LD, they look pretty good from the outset (if the goal is to improve specific cognitive skills, as opposed to say learn about compliance in a commercial property firm).

Plenty of COTS do not do this (95% I would guess at). Theres no problem there, they are designed to entertain. Even some COTS that we think should improve cognition (Civ IV, Spore, Little Big Planet, etc) actually show poor results. There are many reasons for this, but the main point being, when we are looking to improve learning by using immersive environments and gaming techniques, then please, in the rush to make it ‘gamey’, don’t forget the learning. This does not mean sucking the fun out if it, but many practitioners in the game based learning field seem to ignore the insight that science has providing into learning and experitise in pursuit of some sort of gaming purity.

This study shows some pretty healthy results:

After just eight weeks, children’s reasoning scores, on average, increased by 32 percent, reports Newsweek’s blog NurtureShock. The students all attended an elementary school in Oakland, Calif., with historically low test scores.

Perhaps the most important finding in Bunge’s data is that the training helped the neediest kids the most. The farther down a child started on the rankings, the quicker and greater was his cognitive improvement. This is extremely rare in education interventions. Usually, smart kids benefit most, and the kids who struggle at the beginning only fall farther behind. Broadscale education reforms like smaller classes, teacher training, charter schools, and all-day schedules have pricetags in the millions of dollars.

Compare that to the cost of these games, which average only $13 (and Brickbuster [also called Breakout or Brickbreaker] can be played online for free).

This study provides further support to the efficacy of the Nintendo Brain Training type games - see Derek Robertsons work

We are particularly pleased with this award as it takes submissions from learning developers globally and is judged by a panel with an unrivalled insight into learning practice across the world. So many thanks to Jay, George Siemans and Tony Karrer for their feedback.