by Annie | Mar 15, 2014 | Illustration Station
I’m a huge fan of roasting veggies. Broccoli, squash, carrots – you name it, I roast it. However, I’m always nervous about getting the roasting time wrong, since different veggies require different amounts of time in the oven, so as I’m tossing the veggies in olive oil with one hand, I’m often clumsily googling the roasting time with my other hand. The solution? I’ve created a cheat sheet for roasting veggies. I hope this simple chart helps you roast with confidence. Enjoy....
by Annie | Feb 13, 2014 | Game Design, Instructional Design
Ah, eLearning. Unfortunately, when most people come across that term, they immediately groan and roll their eyes, recalling that last boring mandatory online training course in which they spent an hour reading a bunch of seemingly irrelevant text on screen and learning nothing to apply to their day-to-day jobs. But this doesn’t have to be the way it is. Increasingly, eLearning is moving away from the traditional model of content presentation followed by a skills test. Instead, training courses are becoming more exploratory, allowing the learner to try their hand at a real world challenge, make mistakes, and learn the information relevant to the task. Take the example of teaching a learner to use jumper cables. The traditional approach would be to provide learners a manual to read, maybe with a few graphics illustrating the process. If you’re really lucky, you might watch a video showing someone else completing all the steps. However, this doesn’t provide learners with any practice in applying the information and doesn’t provide intrinsic feedback that points to the real world consequences of the learner’s actions. Instead of telling and then testing, exploratory eLearning flips the traditional model on its head. Test first, then tell. In other words, start with the challenge up front, then provide the content in feedback relevant to the learner’s mistakes. In this example, the learner might be tasked with parking their car the correct distance away from the dead car. If the cars touch, they might get a spark and hear a crash. After correctly parking your car, the eLearning might move to a view of the car engines and...
by Annie | Jan 14, 2014 | Game Design, Instructional Design
Last week, I started my new position as an instructional designer with Allen Interactions, a company on a mission to wipe out boring online learning. With my interests in education and design, you’d think I would’ve stumbled into instructional design earlier. And in fact, I did briefly consider a career in instructional design before but shied away due to the boring e-learning courses that have become the stereotype in instructional design. I didn’t want to spend my days working on boring courses that people would dread taking, writing walls of text to throw in front of people, and utilizing the same ineffective training models again and again. Boring for them, boring for me. Thankfully, my interpretation of the field of instructional design was a bit off, or at the least, not universally applicable. Though there will always be boring e-learning courses out there (I’m sure you’ve taken one or two), there are an increasing number of engaging, interesting, and effective e-learning courses impacting every field from sales and marketing to health and education. And that’s why I’ve joined the field. One way that these courses are becoming more engaging is through adopting game design principles to create effective game-based learning. The term “gamification” is often thrown around in corporate meetings these days, both as a way to increase customer retention and to more effectively train internal employees. If you think about it, using games to teach makes a lot of sense. All games aim to teach the player something or other, whether it’s how to solve a puzzle or how to make your character jump, so why not use that...
by Annie | Oct 30, 2013 | Game Design
It’s no surprise, but children’s use of mobile devices is on the rise, with most of them using mobile devices to play games. Check out Common Sense Media’s latest...
by Annie | Oct 3, 2013 | Game Design
Coursera is at it again, offering another excellent online course about games, this time on the topic of video games and learning, presented by Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire of the University of Wisconsin. The course promises to cover everything from the culture of games and human cognition to practical applications of games in the classroom. The course begins today and spans 6 weeks, each of which offers new video lectures, suggested readings, and assignments. So if you haven’t already, register now and join me for this exciting new...
