Sealund’s Serious Games Blog

The SALT conference in February provided a lively expo and a program of diverse sessions in pleasant meeting rooms at the Ramada Orlando Celebration Resort and Conference Center. All of us from Sealund & Associates had a wonderful time meeting old and new friends, and easing corporate training departments’ explorations into the land of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). The learning environments may be virtual, but the corporate culture change into them is very real.

Northrup Grumman presents the case study

In addition to my discussion of VLEs, our audience enjoyed the case study described by my co-presenter, Walter Chandler of Northrop Grumman – the story of how they customized one of Sealund’s game engines with very successful results and his demonstration of the game- “Crater Analysis”

Highlights of our presentation included these topics and a lively question and answer period:

• Virtual Environment Categories and Terms
• The Value of VLEs
• The Role of Role-playing
• Virtual World Forecasts
• The Future of VLEs – Sealund in Second Life
• Game Engines for VLEs
• Northrop Grumman Case Study – a Military Application of a Serious Game Engine for Assessment

Our Busy Booth

The conference participants showed a markedly greater interest in virtual learning environments than ever before. Our visitors asked about VLEs for training in the areas of management, communications and sales, among others. When people asked us how VLEs might be used, we showed them our library of VLE’s and Serious Games Engines.

We also spent quality time with old friends and potential new ones from a broad spectrum of industries – military and academic as well as the private sector (manufacturing, engineering, financial services, technology). It’s always exciting to hear about people’s emerging training needs and be able to help.

That’s why SALT is such an exciting forum for forward-thinking organizations who want to provide the highest quality and most effective training in the most efficient manner. Hope to see you at the next SALT conference!

www.salt.org

Did you attend SALT? What did you think? Please share your comments.

Sealund’s Busy Booth

The 2009 eLearning Guild Annual Gathering hosted hundreds of excited eLearning professionals, all seeking increased resources with decreased budgets. We were sure we could help them meet that challenge. Our booth attracted between 300 and 400 visitors, all eager to discover more about how serious games can boost retention and transfer of knowledge and skills to the job. Of course, they also appreciated our give-aways of lighted pens and mini-staplers with Sealund-blue staples. The exclamation, “Very cool!” could be heard often coming from both our games demo area and our containers of pens and staplers. We’re sure games will become a “staple” of learning because they do attach new skills and knowledge firmly into your brain. (No more puns, I promise!)

Our game engines drove a great deal of enthusiastic attention. The Just PlayIt! game engine and our Let’s Meet Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) engine met a variety of needs for Annual Gathering attendees. For booth visitors who said, “We’re just getting into elearning,” our games engines could ensure successful pilot projects – and ownership of the game engine would allow them to create many more and different games as needed. Other visitors craved “something to make our elearning more exciting and engaging,” and after trying Let’s Meet, they decided, “We think your VLE engine will do that for us.”

Of course, game and VLE engines offer many advantages. Visitors discovered their flexibility and ease of use, observing, “It’s so easy to enter content into the games, using your engines!” Yes, our game engines are powerful tools for instructional designers and SMEs, and they make your CFO happy with great return on investment, but what were the most often heard comments? Those that focused on the learners — “How cool!” and “These games look like fun!” Right! That’s why they work. How they work was the topic of my presentation.

Session: The Anatomy of a Serious Games Engine

We learned on the session “The Anatomy of a Serious Games Engine.” Amy Dreher, VP of Strategic Learning Initiatives at the Nielsen Company and Bobby Meyers, Systems Engineer at Sealund hit the highlights of:

• What a serious game is

• What a serious game engine is

• How serious game engines increase retention and skills transfer

• What a virtual learning environment (VLE) is

• How serious games are used in a VLE

• How to introduce serious games into your company

Our session participants commented on the engines’ versatility for many types of content across all business units. They were also happy with SCORM and 508 compliance and the sophisticated technology “behind the scenes” that made content entry simple while achieving a very sophisticated and engaging learning experience. Participants discovered the effects of a physics engine, a rendering engine, abstraction and modulation. Amy explained the new terms and showed how those engine elements work to ensure the results you want. Attendees also discovered Sealund’s effective strategy for overcoming the resistance most corporate cultures have to innovative approaches … one successful step at a time.

Everyone at the session won new knowledge, and back at the Sealund booth there was more winning to be done.

And the Winner Is …

Sealund & Associates gave away an iPod Touch and a 26” high-definition TV during drawings of business cards at our booth. The lucky winners were Domenic Caloia, an eLearning consultant, who won the iPod Touch, and Amy Barbrick, Sr. Instructional Designer at Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, who won the TV.

Really, the BIG winner is … everyone at the eLearning Guild 2009 Annual Gathering. Hope to see you there in 2010!

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Have you ever wondered why it’s easier to apply a new skill the day after you learn it than during the first day of learning it? Sure, the first practice with any new skill is awkward, and we all know that repeated practice “makes perfect.” But somehow “sleeping on it” makes using that skill the next day somehow feel more natural – as if we’ve been doing it for longer than one day.

Memory consolidation may be the reason why, when we “sleep on it” after learning something one day, we can apply it more appropriately (better, faster, smarter) the next day. Wikipedia describes memory consolidation as several “processes that stabilize a memory trace after the initial acquisition[1]. Consolidation is distinguished into two specific processes, Synaptic Consolidation, which occurs within the first few hours after learning and System Consolidation, where hippocampus-dependent memories become independent of the hippocampus over a period of weeks to years.” The National Council for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) found that “Posttraining increases in REM sleep intensity implicate REM sleep mechanisms in … off-line memory processing, and provide a biological marker of learning potential.”

Does sleeping on it enhance all kinds of learning?

The short answer is – probably. Studies have demonstrated the effects of sleep on learning in several types of content.

In second language acquisition, an NCBI study of learning Morse code and related REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep found that “A computer aided teaching session was performed just before bedrest onset of the experimental night. The learning performance (percentage of saving) was checked on awakening. The Morse code learning led to some modifications in REM sleep components, particularly increases of REM sleep time and number of REM episodes.”

Whether we’re acquiring information or learning motor skills, “the initially formed memory trace apparently continues to be reprocessed after the training has ended. Consequently, when tested at a later date, up to several days to weeks later, the performance to the task is markedly improved even without any intervening training sessions. This so-called slow component of learning has been observed in humans for both perceptual and motor skill learning (Karni and Sagi 1993; Karni et al. 1995), and seems to depend critically on sleep rather than simply on time or initial practice (Maquet 2001; Peigneux et al. 2001).” (“Festina Lente: Evidences for Fast and Slow Learning Processes and a Role for Sleep in Human Motor Skill Learning,” Learning and Memory, 2003 10: 237-239)

Learning games rely on immersive experience. Does sleep help with that, too?

It sure does! A study titled “Consolidation of sensorimotor learning during sleep” demonstrated that “consolidation during sleep for a multimodal sensorimotor skill that was trained and tested in different visual-spatial virtual environments. Participants performed a task requiring the production of novel motor responses in coordination with continuously changing audio-visual stimuli. Performance improved with training, decreased following waking retention, but recovered and stabilized following sleep. These results extend the domain of sleep-dependent consolidation to more complex, adaptive behaviors.” (Learning and Memory, 2008. 15: 815-819)
What does all this mean for how we use learning games? Given that performance decreased after the learners were awake doing other things for awhile, but recovered following sleep, we should probably test performance the day after learning-game experiences to determine the learners’ true capabilities. The overall lesson we can learn here (after sleeping on it, of course) is that learning experiences for complex concepts and skills should probably be delivered over the course of several days rather than in a long one-day session. Given the flexibility of learning games, that’s an achievable model.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

References:

“Consolidation of sensorimotor learning during sleep, Learning and Memory,” 2008. 15: 815-819 - http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/15/11/815.abstract
“Festina Lente: Evidences for Fast and Slow Learning Processes and a Role for Sleep in Human Motor Skill Learning,” Learning and Memory, 2003 10: 237-239 - http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/10/4/237.full.pdf

“Memory Consolidation,” Wikipedia.org - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation