Learning Games and Sims – All about the feedback
Thanks to Julie Dirksen for this guest post. Julie is the Director of Online Training at RMC Project Management. She is also a member of the 2010 LEEF advisory committee.
The more I work with games and simulations for learning, the more I become convinced that the feedback is the most crucial element.
I saw a tweet the other day that read:
Now, I can’t attest to the specific accuracy of that statement, but I can attest to the fact that in most video games, feedback happens in terms of seconds, or, depending on the game, possibly minutes.
What about some of our other common learning formats? How often does feedback happen in those environments?
- A typical e-Learning course: If you are lucky, you might get something every 5-10 minutes in an e-Learning course, but worst case scenario might just be a quiz at the end – maybe once an hour?
- A lecture-based classroom: I’ve certainly had classes where the only feedback was on assignments or exams 3-4 times in a semester, so maybe once a month?
- On the job: People with good managers get feedback more often, but the formal feedback is usually the annual review, so once a year?
And it’s not just the frequency of feedback, but the promptness of it, also. In the tweet above, the feedback is coming within seconds of the behavior, so the person playing:
- is well aware of what the action the feedback is in response to, and
- can still reasonably remember not only what they did, but how they did it.
A friend of mine was just describing a conversation she just had during her annual review where her boss mentioned that he hadn’t liked how she had handled a case that had occurred almost ten months prior. And while we’d love to believe that that kind of delayed feedback is a freakish exception, we know it’s not.
I saw some interesting research the other day that also suggested that students expecting immediate feedback actually perform better than students who expect the feedback to be delayed, at least in a classroom setting. While it would be premature to extrapolate that to other learning environments, it does raise some interesting questions.
In addition to frequency and promptness, the nature of feedback in games and simulations is typically different to feedback in other settings. In games and simulations, feedback is:
- Multifaceted – Feedback comes in the form of sounds, visuals, story narration, interactions with characters, points & rewards.
- Less Absolute – Feedback in games can be more subtle than Correct / Incorrect or ABCDF, or 97% — frequently it can be the reaction of a game character or a slight differentiation in points for one action over another.
- Surprising – Good games frequently have unexpected rewards or achievements, which go a long way to maintaining attention and engagement.
- Immediately related to the behavior – game feedback can almost always be related to a direct behavior, and the player can frequently feed the new knowledge learned from that feedback directly back into their game play.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/ssotd/
There are two ways to leverage this. First, by using more games and simulations for learning, but second (and this is where I think it gets really interesting) by learning to give these kinds of feedback in other environments besides games.
This reflects just one of the topics to be explored at LEEF, the Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum on June 17-18. LEEF is an interactive professional development event showcasing the convergence of learning and entertainment technologies and exploring the organizational, design and technical challenges for adopting games and simulations for learning. Join Julie and presenters such as Jerry Heneghan of Applied Research Associates, Mike Cuffe, VP at Farmer’s Insurance, Phaedra Boinodiris of IBM, Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning, and more at LEEF this summer! The event will take place in Central Pennsylvania at Harrisburg University. Go to www.LEEF2010.net to learn more about the program!
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