Simulations in Education

In his blog entry , “Publisher partners with simulation company to provide virtual education environments” (2009, ¶6),  Aziz writes, “we can begin to use technology to create simulation environments that actually represent actions in the real world without the level of abstraction (along with a healthy suspension of disbelief) required in years past to have our audiences ‘buy in’ to the production.” I remember one of the first times I saw a simulation of a frog dissection, it didn’t look very real to me.  I knew the organs were in the right place, but it looked more like a bunch of cardboard cutouts stuck into a paper frog, rather than a real animal being dissected.

As Aziz notes though, we have moved beyond that, which will make it easier to enable learners in all fields to be able to have an understanding of the content being simulated.  If you don’t have to suspend belief and move into a new realm of reality, then your ability to learn (in my mind anyway) becomes much greater because you can place the simulation in a realistic context.  If a surgeon is practicing a new technique, then having a realistic simulation is extremely important because it needs to look and feel real.

It’s not just the surgeon that needs to have the sense of reality, but even the high school student.  Simulations need to be able to look and feel real to user so that they can integrate into previous knowledge and make it a realistic learning experience.  Additionally, reactions need to be real so that when a user does one thing, the simulation response is something that could actually happen.  If it’s not realistic, then there isn’t much point in using it to try to teach.  As Aziz also puts it, “Technology…could facilitate learning the way human beings were originally designed to learn: by simultaneously engaging multiple sensory input streams” (2009, ¶3).

Aziz is right, we weren’t meant to learn just by writing notes and regurgitating those notes back onto a test.  If we want true authentic learning, we need to incorporate as many areas of life as possible into a single learning experience.  As a history teacher, I often tell my students that in order to truly understand history, you really do need to have an understanding of many other fields, science, math, politics, etc. because they all interrelate in our day to day lives, just as they did 200 or 1000 years ago.  A good simulation to promote learning should also do that.

Reference:

Aziz, H. (2009).  Publisher partners with simulation company to provide virtual education environments. Electronic document retrieved May 16, 2009 from http://bigcreation.blogspot.com/2009/03/publisher-partners-with-simulation.html

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~ by edtechjon on May 16, 2009.