Sealund’s Serious Games Blog

Back in 2008, Ambient Insight reported that the US market for Mobile Learning products and services was growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 21.7%, and indicated that the demand was “relatively immune from the recession.” (Adkins, S.S. (December 2008). “The US Market for Mobile Learning Products and Services: 2008-2013 Forecast and Analysis”) The report covered custom development services, content conversion, and media services in the US market for mobile learning.

We’re half-way through that report’s forecast period now, and many companies have been using mobile learning as an effective medium for all levels and phases of training. It’s effective for getting the latest product and pricing information to sales and support teams - and for validating that they have not only received the information but understand how to use it. mLearning can support sophisticated eLearning teaching and assessment techniques and even games. There really are apps for all, so your courseware can reach your employees whenever they need to learn.

Good Things in Small Packages

Our custom mLearning solutions can reach your employees on their iPhones, Blackberries, and ‘Androids. Because we customize these solutions for you, you know they’ll be user-friendly and instructionally sound.

Because our clients want their employees to learn through the media they enjoy, Sealund’s mTeam is developing custom mLearning applications and introducing m-Learning versions of our existing courseware, based on our new mLearning Methodology to ensure learners of the instructional soundness for which Sealund & Associates has earned recognition since introducing our eLearning methodology in 1985. Our mLearning Methodology supports rapid prototyping for a variety of mobile platforms.

Our new mLearning apps for your iPhone, Android and Blackberry include:

• Alaris™ Financial Literacy Curricula’s “Reducing and Eliminating Debt” curriculum that’s so in-demand for its original platform. The m-Learning version includes rich graphics on every screen as the mentor walks learners through the effective strategies and habits, and another avatar engages learners in a relatable story to practice those habits and strategies. It also provides an interactive calculator for instant and repeated application and reinforcement of new skills.
• The Smart Shopper’s tool that helps you calculate the real cost of big-ticket items by factoring in the interest you’ll pay at the rate and number of months you enter.

Imagine…

Your content, with your corporate branding, at your employees’ fingertips for:

• Your latest sales information and how to use it
• Your latest customer support information and how to use it
• Your latest internal systems updates and how to use them
• Anything else you can imagine … What would that be?

What do you think? Please share your comments.

I found some great fun activities for youngsters, in addition to the blogs already on this page about some of the regional events, online resources, and activities for adults related to Financial Literacy Month in April. Now I want to encourage you to share with children some other online activities that will help them see financial literacy as something they can enjoy using.

Fun and Informative Activities for You

I think we all agree that financial literacy awareness and skill-building should start early … as a story or a game. You can read about why it’s so important for youngsters to learn about handling money, and what happens when they do, on the Financial Fairy Tales website’s blog. (“Learning before Earning” – What a great motto!)

Here are some activities you can introduce to kids, to help them get off to a good start:

• The US Mint’s H.I.P. Pocket Change page opens the door to spending a virtual allowance on the pictures for a greeting card you create online … and can then print out and give to someone.
• On the Apples4theTeacher website, play the Counting Money game (pick a difficulty level and an avatar to begin), or choose from several other Money Games with youngsters.
• Check out some “junior school” level financial games from the United Kingdom.

Resources on the Financial Literacy Month Website

The Financial Literacy Month website offers you ways to commit to and build your own financial wellness.

You can take a pledge to establish and follow a financial plan through having healthy attitudes about money.

There are tools for success, including worksheets for income, net worth, debt load, financial priorities and goals, expenditures and expenses, and an eBook with tips contributed by financially adept consumers.

The Tips for Change desktop gadget for keeping up on consumer tips. You have a choice of gadgets that work with Vista, Google, and Facebook.

Alaris Financial Literacy eLearning

If you’re ready to launch your own financial literacy education, go to www.AlarisFinancialLiteracy.com for the best practices of Financial Literacy. To learn more about this exciting financial literacy curricula, simply click the links below for free information.

• http://www.sealund.com/alaris/Mentors.html
• www.sealund.com/demos/alaris/jts_3d_demo/demo.html
• http://www.sealund.com/samples/alaris_sample/demo.html

Are there Financial Literacy Month events planned in your community? What do you think? Please share your comments.

I’ve already written on this blog page about some of the regional events and online resources related to Financial Literacy Month in April. Now I want to encourage you to enjoy some of these online activities that will help you “spring” into your own financial literacy.

Fun and Informative Activities for You

Check your knowledge with a Financial Literacy Month preparation quiz.

Get the most bang for your precious bucks by finding the best high interest savings accounts, high-yield money market accounts, highest CD rates, and lowest mortgage rates at the Bankrate.com website. This site also offers calculators for a variety of financial issues, from the decision of whether to buy or lease a car, to debt, mortgage, and savings issues.

You’ll find even more calculators at the Financial Calculators website – your current and project cash flow or net worth, consolidating or re-structuring credit card debt, the effects of payroll adjustments on your take-home pay, your investment risk tolerance, and various insurance retirement, savings and tax issues.

Resources on the Financial Literacy Month Website

The Financial Literacy Month website offers you ways to commit to and build your own financial wellness.

You can take a pledge to establish and follow a financial plan through having healthy attitudes about money.

There are tools for success, including worksheets for income, net worth, debt load, financial priorities and goals, expenditures and expenses, and an eBook with tips contributed by financially adept consumers.

The Tips for Change desktop gadget for keeping up on consumer tips. You have a choice of gadgets that work with Vista, Google, and Facebook.

Alaris Financial Literacy eLearning

If you’re ready to launch your own financial literacy education, go to www.AlarisFinancialLiteracy.com for the best practices of Financial Literacy. To learn more about this exciting financial literacy curricula, simply click the links below for free information.

• http://www.sealund.com/alaris/Mentors.html
• www.sealund.com/demos/alaris/jts_3d_demo/demo.html
• http://www.sealund.com/samples/alaris_sample/demo.html

Are there Financial Literacy Month events planned in your community? What do you think? Please share your comments.

We had a very successful few days at the SALT New Learning Technologies 2010 Conference on March 3-5 at Orlando’s Gaylord Palms hotel and convention facilities. We entertained hundreds of attendees at our booth, culminating on the 5th with our 25th Anniversary celebration, where we used the “old technologies” of a big balloon display and held a Great Godiva (chocolates) Give-Away. In keeping with the theme of new learning technologies, though, I did present a session on Incorporating Learning Games into eLearning for an enthusiastic roomful of participants.

I enjoyed lunch with clients, including Will Peratino, OPM, Rick Pinson, Sealund Board, Steve Meyerowich, Sealund AE (at left) and had a great time in Sealund’s booth meeting visitors with the team – Stacy Pagac, Steve Meyerowich and JT (at right). Yes, JT is one of our “virtual” team, an Alaris™ Financial Literacy avatar.

Booth Bonanza

Visitors at our booth enjoyed meeting the team, both human and virtual, and playing our latest learning games. Maria McMeans, General Dynamics, had the most fun; she won the portable DVD player!

Presentation Points

In the room’s warm glow, our session participants discovered the advantages that serious games bring to the learning experience –immediate engagement, increased retention, and improved results.

The more you do, the more you learn, and the more realistic and exciting those activities are, the quicker you learn and the better you can apply it. The adrenaline rush of gaming competition is perfect for that, particularly in a realistic scenario – a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

We saw how assessment games and VLE games, along with other types of games, can improve the effectiveness of even the best eLearning courses.

They also got a look at our latest tool, INTERACTIVTYCreator™ for easy and efficient development of their own games by inserting their content into the tools’ development engine.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

A Reflection

We’re 25 years old! The time has flown, but this landmark anniversary made me stop a moment (or five or ten) to reflect on our evolution to this point and where we’re heading next.

We’ve moved from smaller offices to larger offices, and then to more efficient office layouts for collaboration, as our teams have grown and taken on more and more projects – and a greater diversity of projects. We’ve grown from e-learning and ILT materials to serious games, and to virtual world simulations and games with avatars. We’ve gone from 2D to 3D. (Love the glasses!) We’ve gone to clients’ offices all over the world while our offices have stayed in St. Pete (where our clients love to come for meetings in winter).

Our Wonderful Clients

Speaking of our clients, we have about 250 of them, in the manufacturing, health care, retail, software and other technologies, financial services and insurance industries, and many international businesses in all those industries. In the non-profit sector, our clients include educational institutions, governments and related agencies, utilities, charities, ministries, and social service organizations. They all inspire us with their creative projects, and we now count many of our returning clients over the years as friends.

We are hugely grateful to our clients – and if you are one, THANK YOU! Thank you for challenging us, thank you for your trust, for your collaboration, for your appreciation, for your humor … and, again, for inspiring us to create more and more innovative products to meet your customer and your employees’ needs. Your satisfaction is our greatest professional joy! (Okay, yes, the latest high tech stuff is cool, too, but we’re inspired to make using it easy … for you!)

A Little Celebration

We’ll be celebrating our years together. Some team members have been with Sealund & Associates since day one, others for more than 10 years, and our newest members bring fresh vision and top-notch skills. (Of course, none of us has aged a day, although we have become wiser. Creativity keeps us young. Well, that and fresh vegetable juice.)

We’ll also celebrate the successes of our latest major products, Sealund’s Avatar Animation Technology the Alaris Financial Literacy™ Curriculas, as well as custom mLearning.

Of course, we’ll be brainstorming our next goals. True to our mission of providing our clients with trustworthiness, attentive service and the highest quality, we’re looking to meet our clients’ emerging needs with the most reliable and effective training interventions tailored to their objectives. We’re always listening to our clients, lighting the path for them to where they want to go with their training programs.

So we’re looking forward to many more years of sharing the journey! Where do you want to go? And how can we help as we maintain our vision of being the global leader of customer-focused innovative training solutions.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Our best-in-class Alaris™ Financial Literacy eLearning curricula have always included the Credit Management curriculum, Measuring My Debt, to teach people about the different types of debt that exist, including the difference between good debt and bad debt. The course also gives learners experience in gathering the necessary information to determine the total amount of debt they owe. Learners who complete the curriculum have a more complete picture of what they owe and how it compares to their monthly income, through three courses: Reducing and Eliminating My Debt, Consolidating My Debt, and Considering Bankruptcy. Now, as part of our relationship with the 2010 Real Economic Impact Tour (REI Tour) we are proud to announce our Credit Management curriculum’s compliance with accessibility Rule 508.

The 508-compliant version of the Alaris™ Financial Literacy Credit Management Curriculum was released on February 18th, 2010, and it allows end users to choose whether they want to take the Flash version of the course or to read the course content in an accessible PDF format. Users that choose to take the accessible version of the course are introduced to a new Alaris™ Financial Literacy eLearning mentor named Bob, who provides a unique experience as a handicapped individual.

Of course, the 508 version of the Credit Management curriculum is available to our corporate and educational institution clients, but we are offering it for free to 10,000 users in 100 American cities during the Real Economic Impact Tour, a national initiative delivering free tax preparation and filing assistance, along with other asset building strategies and education to low-income persons with disabilities.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Effective Fun for Learning

We’ve known for a long time that the more fun learners have, the better they learn, and learners perceive rewarding interactivity as fun. Our clients always ask for the most interactivity they can get in eLearning, so learners can experience the adventure of exploring new topics and reinforce what they’ve learned. And we always build our custom eLearning courses and games with plenty of interactivity – with immersive virtual worlds, avatars, and games where you can always improve on your previous personal best.

Now, we’re thrilled to announce an affordable and easy-to-use new tool with which you can build your own interactivities! With our new INTERACTIVITYCreator™, you can build games, add fresh interactivities to existing courses, or make your new courses even more exciting … and engaging. And therefore more effective. (But you knew that!)

Zero Programming

You can create professional-looking activities with zero programming by using its simple and intuitive interface. INTERACTIVITYCreator™’s 15 Flash-based activities include these functions:

• Matching
• Rollover
• Sequencing
• Fill-in-the-blank
• Hangman
• Dictionary/Glossary
• Question Spin
• Image Reveal

… and these games templates:

• Maze
• Trivia Game
• Blok3™
• Answer, Pass, Score!™
• Connect3™
• Fun Feud™
• PaddlePass!™

I bet you’re thinking, “Where was this last year when I needed it?!” I know that’s what I’d been thinking as we’ve been developing game engines for our own use. That’s why we built it, and that’s why it’s available to you!

Outside the Box – an Inspiring Client Idea

We know our Sealund team is creative, but often our clients inspire us with their ingenuity, too. One high school purchased five copies of INTERACTIVITYCreator™ at the 5-copy discount price and had students use them to design their own learning activities. That’s how easy it is! And what is the school using these student-created activities for? A fund-raising project! The school is selling the CDs to raise funds for school activities that, in this economy, need all the support they can get. (Sure hope those student activity-developers get plenty of extra credit!)

I’m sure you can think of ways INTERACTIVITYCreator™ can earn a respectable ROI in your organization, in quicker time-to-publication and faster, more reliable transfer of new knowledge and skills to jobs.

Please try some of the sample activities yourself and see what they inspire you to do with such activities for your own organization. And please let me know what you plan to do with it!

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Financial Literacy Month is April, and the Financial Literacy Update, a newsletter published by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, announces events related to it. These include:

• National Credit Union Youth Week
  April 18–24, 2010 (Nationwide)
• Michigan Jump$tart Coalition 2010 Professional Development Conferences
  March 25, 2010 (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
  April 24, 2010 (Mackinaw City, Mich.)
• Money Smart Week Chicago
  April 17–24, 2010 (Chicago, Ill.)
• Money Smart Colorado
  April 24–May 1, 2010 (Statewide)
• 2010 Symposium: Financial Literacy: Implications for Retirement Security and the Financial Marketplace
  April 29–30, 2010 (Philadelphia, Pa.)

The Jump$tart Coalition’s annual awards dinner also occurs in April – on the 14th, at the Renaissance Washington, DC, hotel. The coalition will honor two Members of Congress and one state coalition, and announce the winner of the prestigious Odom Award.

During Financial Literacy Month, 100,000 Senior Market Advisor organization members—advisers, educators, athletes, celebrities and business coaches—will hold sessions in classrooms around the country to raise awareness of the importance of financial literacy.

Resources on the Financial Literacy Month Website

The Financial Literacy Month website offers you ways to commit to and build your own financial wellness.

You can take a pledge to establish and follow a financial plan through having healthy attitudes about money.

There are tools for success, including worksheets for income, net worth, debt load, financial priorities and goals, expenditures and expenses, and an eBook with tips contributed by financially adept consumers.

The Tips for Change desktop gadget for keeping up on consumer tips. You have a choice of gadgets that work with Vista, Google, and Facebook.

Are there Financial Literacy Month events planned in your community? What do you think? Please share your comments.

Bankruptcy has increasingly become a necessity for private citizens everywhere in the world. CNN Money reported that in the third quarter of 2009, the total number of bankruptcies filed had risen 33%, the highest level since 2005, and the American Bankruptcy Institute, an industry research firm, recorded 388,485 bankruptcies filed during the last quarter of 2009, compared with 292,291 in the same period of 2008. These unfortunate statistics demonstrate that Americans are experiencing the harsh consequences of what we didn’t know about credit management. The 1,117,771 bankruptcy filings in 2009 represent 1,117,771 American individuals’ and families’ sad lessons about financial risk – and we’re far from the only ones. Reuters’ January 5, 2010, report on global consumer and business bankruptcies demonstrated that Americans plenty of company, with 89,402 business bankruptcy filings globally in 2009, compared with 64,584 in 2008, and personal bankruptcies increasing to 1,357,565 in 2009, from 1,031,562 in 2008.

In order to help our clients and partners become better informed and more highly skilled in their financial options, we’ve introduced the Considering Bankruptcy course in our Alaris™ Financial Literacy eLearning Credit Management curriculum. This course builds users knowledge about key items they need to consider to determine whether bankruptcy is a viable option for them. When learners complete this course, they will have more confidence in their decision about filing for bankruptcy to resolve their financial situation.

The Considering Bankruptcy course guides learners through building their skills in:

• Describing the Types of Bankruptcy - Chapter 7 and Chapter 13.
• Identifying which debts bankruptcy eliminates, and which debt does not.
• Using credit counseling and meeting debtor education requirements.
• Identifying the items that require research when considering bankruptcy.
• Understanding the consequences of bankruptcy and the reasons for avoiding it.
• Identifying alternative debt-elimination options other than bankruptcy.
• Considering the complexities and consequences associated with bankruptcy.
• Understanding how to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
• Identifying the initial steps in declaring bankruptcy.
• Coping with declaring bankruptcy.

I hope our other Alaris™ Financial Literacy eLearning curricula can help the vast majority of consumers avoid bankruptcy, but for those who are considering it, this new course will help them deal wisely with the decision-making and, if necessary, declaration processes and their aftermath.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

I was honored to sponsor the Florida Council of Student Affairs luncheon at their State Meeting in Tallahassee on Thursday, February 11, 2010, and serve as a guest speaker during that event. Tonjua Williams, PhD, Vice President, Academic & Student Affairs, St. Petersburg College had invited me to speak to this assembly of student affairs leaders from all 28 state and community colleges and some private institutions. Given the current economic conditions in Florida (and worldwide, of course), I thought they might be very interested in the topic Channel Partner Revenue Opportunities for Alaris Financial Literacy eLearning.

I presented them an opportunity to do well while doing good, by becoming a channel partner for our best-in-class Alaris™ Financial Literacy eLearning curricula. Their students, alumni and employees can benefit from the information and skills they gain in handling their finances, from overall budgeting principles to the details of responsible management of student loans, credit cards, identity protection, and other lifelong financial matters. The colleges and universities benefit from the channel partner relationship in offering the Alaris™ curricula in two ways – by receiving up to 50% of the revenue for each course taken and by association with our outreach to the disabled community through our involvement with the 2010 Real Economic Impact Tour (REI Tour) and our Credit Management curriculum’s compliance with accessibility Rule 508.

Our potential channel partners were interested in the options of hosting the Alaris™ curricula themselves or using Sealund and Associates’ hosting service , and they warmly received the mentor-driven approach of the courses. Their enthusiastic feedback included many expected issues and one very pleasant surprise. Everyone agreed that students, alumni and employees all need financial literacy education. They saw the benefit of the revenue sharing opportunity.

The pleasant surprise was an invitation from Geoffrey Fortunato (Dean of Students at Seminole State College of Florida) to speak to the FACC in May in Jacksonville, because he liked the Alaris™ curricula concept and channel partner opportunity so much that he thought the 120 student development practitioners from the Florida College system would also be very interested. I’m looking forward eagerly to speaking with them, too!

What do you think? Please share your comments.