VisualsSpeak blog

I love technology, so I was excited to see there was a range of presentations at the North American Simulations and Gaming Association (NASAGA) conference covering a wide swath of possibilities. I’m not a fanatical online gamer, nor do I develop a lot of e-learning, but I spend a large portion of each day at the computer. I get really antsy when my internet connection goes down.

Design Instant Online Flash Games

Raja Thiagarajan’s session was hands down my favorite of all the technology sessions. Why? Because Raja’s session was designed with the learning first. The technology merely served the learning objectives. I learned:

• How engaging simple flash games could be
• Which type of game to select for what type of content
• How to login and access the software
• How to create games through the admin interface

I immediately saw how I could use this to aid stickiness after a training by emailing a link to participants to play a game around the key points. I could see using them in a webinar, or other online engagement.

It was an interactive session about an interactive method. YES! I know it took a lot of effort for Raja and the others behind the scenes to get the software running on all the computers, but it was totally worth it. People were highly engaged, clustered around the computer screens.

I have played the shell games on the Thiagi group site in the past, but I never thought I could create them and use them. Now I know how easy it is.

Playmotion

I missed the keynote session on Playmotion, since I got talking with a colleague. I did see the demo of it before the evening auction. It appeared to be some kind of interactive projection system. You could stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling screen and interact with whatever was projected.

Some examples were that smoke would respond to dancers, puzzles that could be solved by hitting the letters into the boxes, balls that would bounce. The possibilities for interactive full body learning were huge. I just kept seeing all the little kids in schools being freed from the confines of their desks….and actually engaging the way most kids like to engage.

This is the type of technology that would be great for VisualsSpeak. The ability to move the images around is so vital to the process for many people. I would love to be able to create huge interactive vision maps.

NASA’s Distributed Observer Network (DON)

Even the title of this session is an indicator of it’s complexity. This session was in two parts. In the first part, Tom Cuddy described a bit about the challenge of creating a simulation environment for the complex process of taking care of the shuttle. Allowing engineers to explore on the computer and especially try things out, makes a lot of sense. Particularly after the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

I did learn there is some kind of core code you can purchase from game developers that you can use as a head start for a simulated environment. What that is or what it really means is lost to me as a non-programmer. Being married to an electronic engineer, I am accustomed to nodding and saying un-huh as I listen to complex descriptions of the inner workings of electrons and the codes that command them.

Despite a moody electrical system, Tom and Tate Srey were able to get the simulation running on computers and we were able to play with it. Being able to move part of the shuttle’s tanks around and look at them from different angles was interesting. Why I would want to do that is a bit lost on me, but I’m not the target audience of engineers. I certainly can imagine my husband and his software guys spending hours analyzing and creating any number of theories to test using this simulation.

Ian Bogost: Future of games in learning

Ian spoke after dinner, before the silent auction. As a professor from Georgia Tech, he had a well constructed argument laid out. It started with assumptions people make about the value of games, possible ways of looking at the value of games, and moved to propose a new set of assumptions.

Clearly, Ian has worked to develop his presentation, and it was engaging to listen to in the moment. The slides were well designed. He did not read them to us.

I remember the overall message, that games can be engaging and educational. I remember he plays a lot with his kids and they love the Animal Crossing game. I remember persuasion being a key to these new designs his company is developing.

I can’t remember any of the details. Why? No handouts. We were sitting in a darkened room after dinner and I wasn’t prepared to take notes. Notes for me are a way to convert audio to visual. I many never look at them again, but they anchor learning for me in the moment.

Another thing that happened was Ian showed screen after screen of visuals from the games. They were well done, but in fairly rapid succession they became a form of visual overload. I remember thinking they were compelling in the moment, but the concepts didn’t stick.

I enjoyed Ian’s presentation and I remember enough of it to feel I got value from the experience. He was a good speaker, his content was developed and thought through.

There has to be a better way

There were a number of other technology demo sessions. Not just at this conference, but at a number of others I have attended recently. Here is the formula:

• people sit in rows of chairs or at tables
• presenter tells audience how cool their new interactive engaging e-learning or game is
• show screen after screen of what some of the screens look like
• if the audience is lucky, there may be a branching choice the audience gets to call out for them to select

Now I realize most conferences aren’t in computer labs. Even those that suggest bringing laptops suffer from unreliable wireless and slow connections. I know handouts with a lot of images are hard to produce and quite expensive to print, especially in color.

Still, there has to be a more effective session design. Even when I was interested in the product being showcased, very little stuck. About all I remember is that it was interesting. I can’t even remember why.

This leads me to some questions for those of us making presentations:

• How can technology sessions about interactive designs be done interactively?
• Can you get beyond the technology challenges?
• Can we apply the interactive principles in the products to the demos and the sessions used to showcase them?
• How can we manage the visual overload of showing multiple screens of visual interfaces?

What have you seen work?

Technology Overall

I really appreciated the inclusion of all the technology at the conference. There was learning in all the sessions, even if it wasn’t exactly what the presenter intended.