Welcome and Member Introductions

I am Don Denier, retired instructional designer, trainer, and facilitator living on the Pacific coast of Washington State. I found that when interventions include activities that are both enjoyable and informative the achievement of learning objectives is greatly enhanced.

Although fully retired, on occasion I will work in my community or for others on a project basis to design interventions that most often use games, role-plays, simulations, and other activities that involve the participants actively. My purpose in joining NASAGA is to learn form those who are actively engaged in this arena, and to share what I may have to offer with others.

Hi, I am Dianne, an Instructional Designer for Great-West Healthcare. I love to find new and interesting ways to make training more interactive. Simulations and games are a big part of that so I'm hoping to learn and share ideas.

Hello All: I'm Mike Goran, and my company is CorpJesters, founded nearly 10 years ago here in Toronto, Canada. We help companies make Serious Breakthroughs in Communications. We facilitate How to Connect, Communicate and Innovate using a unique and functional combination of Solution Focused tools, Improv and Structured Roleplay. Before CorpJesters (which seems sooooo long ago now..!) I instructed and toured with Second City for several years; I've also spent time in IT and Advertising, and recently completed my studies for my Certificate in Adult Education at OISE/University of Toronto. I attended the NASAGA conference in Montreal a few years back, and am looking forward to finding a way to the next one in Atlanta. More info for the curious can be found at http://www.corpjesters.com

Hello, my name is Jesse Strycker and I am a doctoral student in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. My main area of research is with virtual learning environments with a specific focus on games and simulations. I look forward to being a part of a group of like-minded individuals.

Hello everyone,
My name is Dan Topf and my firm is Management Development International, Inc. I learned of NASAGA from a colleague in Germany, and I'm happy to be joining you now. www.mdi-learning.com

I specialize in business simulations, working with tools from Celemi, Ten Thousand Feet, BTS, and others. I very much enjoy the work we do and watching the "lights come on" when people participate in our seminars.

I've been in learning and performance for 18 years. I have a B.A. and an M.A. I've also earned the Certified Performance Technologist (CPT) designation from ISPI.

I specialize in design and delivery of leader and manager development in business.

Thanks for the opportunity to network with you!

Hello All:

My name is Ray Hutchins and I am president of the SimGame Exchange. The SimGame Exchange helps businesses use interactive gaming and simulations technology to improve business performance.

A major project I am working on at the time is the development of an online, interactive, multi-media training system for the restaurant industry. A core element of this system is a state-of-the-art 3D simulation of a restaurant environment.

I have joined this organization because I am seeking resources and talent related to the development and deployment of this type of system. Also, perhaps my efforts will be beneficial to others of you who have visions of using these technologies to improve business performance.

I look forward to meeting some of you and engaging in dialogue related to this venture.

Best regards,
Ray

Hello all,

I am eliza hl, and my extended lurking period has expired. I am design/development for the Income/Outcome business simulations and its various companion pieces including what I think is the world's first visual glossary of corporate finance.

I am several months late with an apology - I had planned for the introduction of our newest business game ‘Entrepreneurial Challenge’ at the last NASAGA conference but I am not a facilitator, and I was unable to juggle some unforeseen circumstances… so my apologies to all, and my assurance that we will try again.

I believe deeply that games are a natural, human way to learn & experiment safely. Therefore I have been known to spend the odd hour (::ahem::) in an on-line role-play game involving gnomes and their heroic exploits, and I am quite certain that I did learn much.

I also own about 200 board games, many of which were bought at thrift stores and have not been played by us. I am in Chapel Hill, NC; so if you are ever nearby and want to try some of them, we can make it happen.

Hie
I am Shielly, a Corporate Trainer working in the healthcare sector. I have joined NASAGA recently and Learning by fun excites me. I have a passion for training & keep on exploring new things and trying them. I feel very good being associated with an organization where I can share training games & know about new ones.
  regards

Shielly Pahwa Bahl, New Delhi, India

Hello Everyone. I just found this site. I'm a grad student in Organizational Psychology at Golden Gate U. here in San Francisco. Since I'm in my last semester I will soon be looking for a job. I remember the simulations we did in political science in undergrad school, and how much I learned and how much fun they were. I am very interested in doing some kind of work that uses simulations to teach different ideas and provide people with different experiences. I am happy to see there are members here from all over the world.

Hi Everyone

My name is Heather Stuart & I'm from Sydney, Australia. I'm an adult educator working in the public sector. I've got some limited experience in using games in training but would like to expand on this, particularly the use of simulations. Currently I am working on a project to train people in incident management skills in the public safety area. I am particularly interested in how I could use simulations to practise and reinforce the training. One of the areas I'd like to explore more is the use of virtual worlds for this. Looking forward to seeing how others across the world are using games and simulations.

Heather,

You might be interested in a prototype system for emergency medical services incident management we developed for the U.S. National Institutes of Health:

http://www.stottlerhenke.com/projects/wmd_ems_its/

Jim Ong
ong@stottlerhenke.com

Hi Heather! Welcome to Nasaga. You might be interested in this. I used a part of the cartoon-movie Monsters Inc. as a warm up activity in safety management training. I showed the part in which there is an emergency and everybody knows and follow the procedures ... there is also a small part of "training" where some people (monsters) are simulating the activity and just after the simulation the trainer asks what was wrong. The movie is funny and trainees were surprised to see something funny instead of "traditional" videos ... usually quite boring .. (in Italy VERY boring) so their attention was high. After the movie I started the debriefing asking what did they see, the importance of prevention, procedures training and so on ... The movie is supposed to be for children but, I think, it is so accurate in details (all the story is played in a "factory") so intelligent in reproducing real situation that adults will enjoy it.
If you need any other explanations do not hesitate to email me
claudia.arpaia@poste.it
Good luck!
claudia

Hi everyone,

My name is Franco and I have just joined this community. I am an Italian trainer and facilitator. I run Leadership Programs and Developmental Training for private companies throughout Europe.
I like to use (whenever possible) icebreakers and games as learning means and I am happy about the fact that, within this community, I can expand my knowledge and learn from the experience of other professionals.

Welcome and Member Introductions

Welcome! It's great to see how games as learning crosses all cultural boundaries!

Hi Jim

Thanks for the link - it looks really great. I'm going to share it with the project team I'm working with to see if they think something similar would work in our organisation.

Did you manage to get funding for Phase II of the project?

Heather Stuart

Hi Claudia

Thanks for the welcome and the tip.

The traditional training videos in Australia can also be a bit boring, you often see participants' eyes glaze over at the mention of a video. I'll check out Monsters Inc and see if I can use it in any of my courses.

Heather

Hi folks. My name is Bob Stone - I've just joined NASAGA, although I should have known about you guys ages ago, as there are some quality and highly informative postings here (unlike another listserv I could mention, which seems to attract far too much serious games testosterone from academic and other chest-beaters!). Anyway, I've been in the Virtual Environments arena since 1987, recently (2003) moving into academia myself. We have a small but very active - and "hands-on" - serious games team over here in Birmingham, UK (University of Birmingham - NOT the Serious Games Institute!), involved in defence, education, medicine and heritage applications of the technology. Our focus is primarily content, interactivity design and evaluation from a Human Factors perspective. So I'm looking forward to meeting up with like-minded folk out there who want more than just another dose of technology push, as we seem to get regularly from other branches of this community. I feel that, until we take the human factors issues seriously, then the community ain't going to get very far (like its VR predecessor in the 1990s). If anyone is interested, I've just finished the first edition of an 80-page Human Factors Guidelines document for Interactive 3D and Serious Games. It's currently under review by our MoD sponsors, but I hope to have it cleared for public distribution in April.

Heather,

Unfortunately, the Incident Management project did not receive phase 2 funding from NIH. However, we continue to enhance and market the underlying development tool, SimVentive (www.simventive.com),

Jim

Heather,

I should add that in our Incident Management training simulation, we deliberately avoiding using jazzy game technologies we've seen used within other, technology-driven training systems, such as helicopter views of the incident, 3-D cutaway views of buildings, etc., with in favor of much more pedestrian media such as a simulated radio, a map, and reference documents on chemicals because, in reality, those are the sources of information and methods of control that incident managers and branch commanders work with for small to mid-sized incidents. Of course, for other training applications, we think that jazzy graphics are instructionally effective and have used them. (see www.stottlerhenke.com/solutions/training).

Jim

Good day, everyone. My name is David, and I am very pleased to be among you. I teach biomedical topics to insurance folks, and coach field trainers in training development. I love it when I find out that something that I believed about training is wrong, and have a chance to improve my understanding. This happens to me often. I hope that it will happen during our discussions.

Best wishes!