Designing Web-Based Training: How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime

6.15. Learning game

Learning games let people learn by playing. Learning games are computer simulations that allow learners to practice a highly interactive task. They provide a model of a real-world system. By repeatedly playing the game, the learner spots and infers principles.

6.15.1. When to use learning games

Use learning games to let learners gain experience performing an activity without the risk or cost of the real activity.

• The real activity takes too long. Example: making genetic modifications to plants

• The real activity is too dangerous. Example: operating a nuclear power plant

• Training on real systems is too expensive. Example: learning to fly the Space Shuttle

• Failures are expensive. Example: investing in crop futures

• Failures are embarrassing. Example: triggering a false alarm in a security system that may summon the police

• The subject is too boring. Example: planning meals using government nutritional data (p 256)

Learning games are expensive and time-consuming to develop-typically 100 times the cost of a simple multiple-choice text question. Often they are worth the expense, but not always.

6.15.2. How learning games work

In learning games, learners act to achieve a goal. Games begin with instruction on the goal and basic rules of the game. Learners are then given the goal and put into a situation. To achieve the goal, learners must repeatedly react to change the situation.

We learn geology th e morning after th e eart hquake.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

6.15.3. Example ...