Simulations gone wild, in a bad way

This is an interesting link - although not to an electronic simulation, to one that was done in "the real world" in the early 70's.

Just a counterpoint... that most simulations are immersive, but seem to not want to teach or instruct on an output or end state, but the process, and essential thinking and interaction skills (people-to-people, people-to-information, people-to-systems, etc.). And those that focus on the end state typically can be categorized into a group of repetitive or cyclic activities that have a fairly well bounded set of outcomes, or at least a set of outcomes that can be anticipated with a modest degree of accuracy.

Anyways, what I'm thinking is that everything we do in education is a re-creation, a model, a simulation, a re-presentation of something as a stimulus (a-ha! I knew I had some behaviorist in me!) and then some organization, interaction and presentations of meaning. So, to me, digital sims and models are just more complex (and often costly) evolutions in the progress and path of instruction.

Games, on the other hand, seem to offer both motivational properties, as well as a means to use rules as the boundaries and conditions and content for learning - or how we learn and interact with the content. In the end, a potentially interesting way to encourage learning without promoting it as instruction. Somewhat sneaky. Which then begs the question, "how can you sublimate the instructional / learning content and activities in a game if you must perform some form of behavioral analysis of responses and analyze the progression of learning by engaging the gamer / learner and breaking the "flow" (akin to asking some person to stop playing Super Mario to explain what they've learned, how they learned it, and if they could please demonstrate or recreate that learning or skill or knowledge (also difficult to do with a state-based game process).

In the end, if the process of eval and assessment were added to a game like instructional tool, perhaps if the outcome of that assessment and eval was of utility and re-use and of strategic value for the gamer / learner going forward, we could extend the game analogy, incorporate key instructional design qualities, and maintain the "flow" / minimize any distractions to the game.

Just some thoughts... that have less to do with the Stanford experiment than they do with gaming, sims, and modeling in general.

tc