Short Sims
Clark Aldrich's
For your next educational program, will you use effective simulations or scalable online workbooks? How about the best of both?
Short Sims for Inclusiveness
Building Conviction, not just Awareness: Behaving differently in the real world often requires that learners change their convictions. This can't happen through traditional educational lectures and online workbooks, but it does happen with Short Sims.
Short Sims for New Experiences
Building Experience, not just Awareness: We don't understand a new car by looking at it in the showroom, but by test driving it. In this Short Sim, new employees practice their first day back to the office in the COVID era rather than reading about it.
What is education's terrible choice?
Short Sims to Understand Behaviors
Building Insight, not just Awareness: We can no more build competence and conviction by listening to a lecture than we can build coordination by watching someone else jogging. This sim enable learners to teach themselves, which is why the learning endures.
Short Sims to Understand Concepts
When traditional textbooks failed, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brought in Clark Aldrich to create Econ 101 labs so students could learn about demand curves experientially. It and other Clark Aldrich Short Sims were embedded in next-generation textbooks.
Short Sims for B-Schools and High Potential Employees
Baby Boomers pioneered case studies, with a lot of reading to set up one or two big issues for discussion. The next generations prefer interactive scenarios with a lot less passive reading and a lot more impactful decision making. The group-building discussions can then focus on the growth beyond the classroom. This Short Sim - a simple yet sophisticated business simulator - served as a shared next-generation case study for a group of high potential managers to enable richer, aligned conversations in what became a large corporation's most popular class.
Short Sims for New Employees
The obsession over expensive, useless metrics in both classrooms and online learning has evolved from a history of educational experience that have been unpalatable and not obviously useful. Think brussel sprouts. “Eat it. It may taste terrible, but it is good for you.”
Instead, this Short Sim helps new employees test drive their new job quickly and safely, before their first day, and with rigorous lessons. The value is obvious to the learners and the sponsors.
Short Sims for Cyber Security
To defend against Ransomware, employees need less lectures and more practice in incrementally more challenging situations, which this Short Sim provides.
Short Sims for Salespeople
Sales people are action focused with little tolerance for wasting time. But they could use a bit of empathy for the people to whom they are selling. This excerpt from a longer Short Sim helps salespeople understand cloud features from their customers' perspective.
Short Sims for Experimentation
If you wanted to learn about driving, and you had available an indestructible car and a test track, how many people would start by going to a lecture? Given that, Clark Aldrich created a short game to expose Econ students to the Four P's of marketing. The approach is quick, interesting, and effective.
Short Sims for Universities
Remember when you heard a teacher explain how to solve some math problem? How much help was that really when you looked at your homework problems that night?
We learn by doing. We learn by experimenting. This Short Sim helps college freshmen experience a difficult Econ concept by doing, not listening.
Short Sims for New Experiences
