STEM - Why branching stories
Back when I started thinking about working with games and learning I got excited about the possibilities. I got an Individual Learnscope project to build the Blue Skies. This was a Flash-based game for people in the fields of design and craft to explore the link between markets and product development. This was always built for different applications and customisation. The idea with the engine is that a user would be able to research a problem and then explore how different solutions solved that specific problem. BUT when I attempted to explain how it worked to trainers and teachers, it just appeared to be too complex for them.
Back to the drawing board
It was back to drawing board to search for other solutions that could be easier for the majority of educators. You remember those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books? They where one of the most popular children's books during the 80's and 90's with over 250 millions copies sold. These books must have gotten something right. One way to look at most stories and narratives in computers games is by branching stories.
With Serious Games there are a lot possibilities, but solutions such as 3D worlds are just beyond the budgets of what most of the clients I work with have. These clients are often just excited when there e-learning authoring software allows them to be able to make a quiz.
The solution I settled on was branching interactions that can be used for decision trees, branching stories or simple simulations.
I think about desktop-based interactive design as being a continuum from basic text and quizzes to immersive 3D worlds.
There is a lot that can't be done with these types of branching interactions but it is a start to going beyond pages of text and quizzes.
I've called the system STEM. It is Flash-based and runs on most desktop browsers and a lot of educational developers use Flash. It's open source so everyone can use it and have control over it. At the moment changing a simple XML file does authoring. One day soon there will be an authoring system.
An example
A good example is from the Electrical Contractors project last year that Sprout Labs worked on. The focus of this course was about business skills for electrical contractors.
The original marketing pages for the course are shown below
This was reworked into the following activity where the learner is put into the role of being a business coach.
The reworking isn't just about the technology. A major part of what was done was rethinking it as "an experience". This meant switching resources from a being an information dump to coming up with problems that Electrical Contractors face on a daily basis and exploring those. These where practice activities before the learners moved on to developing their own business plans. These are the types of interactions that Cathy Moore talks about a great deal.
As Ralph (one of teachers and experts involved in the project) said, "Yes, the students could just read all that stuff but they wouldn't get and be so engaged."
What is really great is that I'm finding that educators have no problem understanding how to design and develop these interactions.
To download STEM see http://www.sproutlabs.com.au/stem/
