The Digital Game-Based Learning(4)

Despite what corporatespeak might dictate the material be called, companies in the business world are increasingly turning to Digital Game-Based Learning for:

Material that is dry, technical and, yes, boring

Subject matter that is really difficult

Audiences that are hard to reach

Difficult assessment and certification issues

Complex process understanding

Sophisticated “what if” analyses

Strategy development and communication.

Let’s look at two examples.

Case Study 1

The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy :

How to get 3 million engineers to learn (and like it)

In the Spring of 1998, I sat waiting one morning at 7a.m. in Fraunces Tavern, where George Washington gave his farewell address to his officers and reputedly the oldest restaurant in New York City. It is conveniently located right next door to Goldman Sachs, the investment bankers and financiers. Aside from the waiters setting up, I was the only person there at that hour, waiting for what I expected to be a routine breakfast meeting with a CEO interested in doing business with my company, games2train. At 7:

增强现实 虚拟现实 人机交互

15 in strode the man I was to meet. At a lanky six foot six, wearing a baggy, beige, unstructured suit and colorful tie, with shoulder length hair tied back in a pony tail and a big infectious smile on his face, Joe Costello was definitely not what I was expecting.

Costello, the CEO of a new company called think3, was bursting with energy — literally a man on a mission. A highly respected veteran executive in Silicon Valley, he had built Cadence Design Systems from sales of $50 million to over $1 billion. He had been tapped by Michael Milkin to be CEO of Milkin’s new learning company, Knowledge Universe, and had started and quit within a week. Now he had just signed on to lead a small company with a terrific new 3D mechanical drafting CAD (= Computer Aided Design) software product in its quest to capture the mechanical design market. “This market hasn’t moved in a long time and is ripe for change”, Joe told me, “and I like change.” He was squeezing in his meeting with me before a (successful) request to Goldman for $25 million

Think3’s product, thinkdesign was demonstrably better than the product that the vast majority of mechanical designers were using, known as AutoCAD. More like the rarified “high-end” CAD packages costing $15-20,000 per seat, thinkdesign allowed mechanical designers to work directly in 3D, instead of starting from the 2D drawings of AutoCAD. Backed by impatient venture capital money from Goldman and others, Costello’s business objective was crystal clear — to convert as many of the 3 million-or-so AutoCAD users to thinkdesign as quickly as possible. His first major obstacle, the traditionally large difference in price between 2D and 3D products, was removed by his board’s agreement to lower the price of thinkdesign to match the price of AutoCAD. But another, even more formidable obstacle remained, Costello knew — ease of learning.

Despite all the great advantages of 3D drafting over 2D, most mechanical design engineers were loath to make a change. CAD programs are extremely complex and traditionally have a steep learning curve. The mechanical designers — almost all male engineers between the ages of 20 and 30 — were extremely comfortable with AutoCAD, which they had been using for years, typically since engineering school. AutoCAD did the job for them — why change? Learning a new CAD system — especially a powerful one — would take a lot their time and effort. They would have to learn to draft, and even think, in a whole new way. (Hence the company name “think3”). Focus groups showed that most of these engineers were reluctant — and even dreaded — going “back to school” to learn a new product, no matter what its supposed advantages.

“Why is this?” Costello wondered “It just doesn’t seem possible that it could be or had to be that complicated.” After all, these were professional people, many with advanced degrees, who had spent lots of time in school. Learning was nothing new to them. As an engineer himself, and a former training manager for Cadence Design Systems (the company of which he later became CEO) Costello finally concluded that the engineers dreaded the training precisely because it was dreadful. Whether delivered by traditional instructor-led training (“ILT”) in a classroom, or by newer computer-based training (“CBT”) on the screen, learning a new CAD product consisted of someone starting from the absolute beginning, taking you through all the lessons, no matter what you already

增强现实 虚拟现实 人机交互

knew or how fast you could go. “In this first lesson you will learn about the workplane” the traditional training began. It would take hours and hours — or more likely days — before you ever got to do anything interesting or work at the skill level you were used to. There was absolutely no fun in it. It was just too boring to bother.

Costello was not willing to accept this as his company’s training. He was convinced there had to be a better way, and set out to find it in the training marketplace. He soon became very frustrated. “We talked to lots of companies,” he said. “We looked at the existing different kinds of training approaches and there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was basically essentially you had the old manual and instructor-led training kinds of approaches — get everybody in a classroom and bore them to death and hope that they stick around for lunch — and there were a few people who put the same boring stuff on CD ROMs A couple of those did what I call the ‘dancing banana’ effect which is put a few animations around the same old boring dry material that has litt …… 此处隐藏：5814字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……