Do they die in real life?

The other day I was giving a keynote address on games and simulations in a medical environment and one of the participants said that she was told that in a simulation, the virtual patient should never die because that would be too traumatic for the learner. I asked her if patients ever died for real in the hospital where she worked–because if they didn’t I wanted to go to that hospital. She said that “yes, unfortunately patient do sometimes die in the hospital.” Then, I said, they have to die in the simulation.

In a related tangent, on a consulting phone call, someone asked me to weigh in on whether or not the final assessment should be a multiple choice test or an exercise using a realistic simulation of the actual software. I asked “does the actual job require the person to complete a multiple choice test?” The answer was a giggle and then a resounding “no”.

The assessment for a learning event must be as realistic as possible.

It must be as close to the real working condition as it can possibly be. If it is too far removed from the actual situation in which the learning is needed, then the transfer from the learning event to the actual event will be minimal at best. (think about the transfer from classroom to performance…not so great.)

Too often, we don’t want to make the learning too hard for the learner or we don’t want to “trick” the learner but, you know what, real life is hard and tricks us. Complications arise, people get hurt and, yes, sometimes they die. The learning events we create must realistically emulate those situations (if appropriate to the learning event we are delivering).

If we soft petal the learning event, we short change the learner. Let them complain about difficult training, it is better than having them totally “blow it” on the job because it was so much more difficult than the learning event.

Here are some ideas I have on creating software scenarios for learning. Creating a Scenario to Teach Software Procedures

__

Catalog of Recommended Books, Games and Gadgets
Recommended Games and Gadgets
Recommended Books
Content Guide