Gredler: Is it a Simulation or is it a Demonstration?

How are games and simulations different? How does the distinction matter?

The straight-from-the-article-answer is “Briefly, games are competitive exercises in which the objective is to win and players must apply subject matter or other relevant knowledge in an effort to advance in the exercise and win. An example is the computer game Mineshaft, in which students apply their knowledge of fractions in competing with other players to retrieve a miner’s ax. …Simulations, in contrast, are open-ended evolving situations with many interacting variables. The goal for all participants is to each take a particular role, address the issues, threats, or problems that arise in the situation, and experience the effects of their decisions. The situation can take different directions, depending on the actions and reactions of the participants. That is, a simulation is an evolving case study of a particular social or physical reality in which the participants take on bona fide roles with well-defined responsibilities and constraints.”

But the most significant distinction which I picked up from this article, in the context of educational games vs. educational simulations, is that with games, everyone is (potentially) a winner, whereas with simulations, everyone is (potentially) a loser, because you failed the task (killed the patient, crashed the airplane), or you completed the task less effectively or less efficiently than did your peers (didn’t make as much money as they did).

Describe an experience you have had with games and/or simulations in an educational environment.

I do not recall any experience with games in an educational environment. My first experience with simulations was a marketing simulation program called Marksim (how clever). This was at Whittier College as an undergrad, about 1976. My team would get together, review some printouts from the previous “quarter”, decide on a course of action (R&D, advertising, etc.), and submit our decisions – in writing – so someone could put them on punched cards and run them on the computer. If everything went well, all teams would have the results of that “quarter” the next day. (It seems that when I was younger I had to spend a lot of time listening to the old guys tell their stories. These days I find myself doing more and more storytelling….)

I once wrote an assembly language programming emulator using JavaScript. The user could actually write and execute their own programs using my “computer”. That was a real simulation, in that programs which the user wrote either worked or didn’t work.

What did you find particularly interesting in the article that you might investigate further during the semester?

I think I may have misunderstood what constitutes a simulation in the context of this course. What I previously considered “simulations”, I would now have to label as “demonstrations”. Consider, for example, statistics simulations. With these simulations (demonstrations), the user typically provides two or three parameters and clicks on Go, the simulation (demonstration) does its thing, displays its results, and it stops. A demonstration of the central limit theorem (the shape of the distribution of sample means approaches the normal distribution as the sample size increases) might ask for a simple frequency distribution and a sample size. For examples, see http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lane/stat_sim/. This website is, in fact, entitled “Simulations/Demonstrations”. I think these would clearly be labeled “demonstrations” in the context of this course, as there is no final objective, no win or lose, and no ongoing dialogue.