Rob Penn, CEO of SuddenlySmart (makers of SmartBuilder, one of the new breed of authoring tools), interviewed me last fall about engaging learning: game design, simulations, etc. It followed one by Professor Allison Rossett of SDSU (also available at the site).
I always find it hard to listen to myself (my voice sounds much better in my head :), and the audio is a little murky, but I hit the usual important notes about focusing on decisions that learners need to be able to make, getting challenge right, capturing misconceptions, and more.
Rob also gets me to discriminate between simulations, scenarios, and games (simulations are just models, scenarios have an initial state and a goal state learners should get to, you can tune a scenario into a game), and I also elaborate how you go from multiple choice, through branching scenarios, to full simulation driven engines (jumping off from Rob’s question instead of first answering it, mea culpa!).
Feedback welcome!
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