role-play simulations

I’ve got a Technical White Paper in front of me – it’s actually a proposal from a company that specializes in creating computerized role-plays called immersive simulations. They want to create a human simulation training program for our target audience of mental health clinicians, using their unique interactive people simulation technology. I’ll describe the salient points.


The background section describes some prior PC-based training applications built for federal government sponsors and military personal. These programs feature an actor who serves as a realistic simulated character who has face-to-face conversations with the e-learning student. All question choices and responses are scripted and recorded with audio and video. The character is programmed with over a thousand responses for hundreds of possible questions. The simulated character is dynamic, has memory and employs an advanced emotional model to enable natural, logical responses, including mood changes. In this system, the user experiences a variety of responses, resulting in an unlimited number of different scenarios.


It’s interesting how this vendor proposes several different learning options for consideration. One option is a self-paced, knowledge- based module, in which the learner would interact with a simulated character and have few opportunities to make mistakes. Conversely, a second option involves a more advanced, skill-based module, where the learner would have ‘ample’ opportunities to make errors with numerous simulated characters that manifest various emotional states. Each option would be produced on a CD-ROM or DVD, most likely to accommodate the heavy file sizes. (The portability of a disc is no doubt a big advantage for military training implementations).


Check out this link on the Learning Circuits Blog to read an interesting post about mistake-based learning as an evidence-based approach to skill building.