On Twitter this morning, a colleague shared the link to an online game, Spent (http://playspent.org/). After playing it, I was inspired to comment about the learning experience . This game was developed for The Urban Ministries of Durham, North Carolina and although it’s a “game,” there’s nothing funny about it.
As the game opens, here’s what appears, one line at a time, on a stark black background:
Your savings are gone.
You’ve lost your house.
And you're down to your last $1,000.
Can you make it through the month?
Maybe they weren’t trying to create “lessons,” but the game is lesson intensive, in a very impactful way. The game puts you in a realistic situation and asks you to make realistic decisions. You start by choosing from a variety of jobs (top screenshot: click to enlarge). I chose temporary worker (admin work) at $9 an hour and was presented with a typing test (middle screenshot: click to enlarge). Uh-oh. They say my typing skills are insufficient so I wasn’t hired. I applied next to be a 
warehouse worker and got that job. Now it’s time to find a place to live. Every option takes up more than 75% of my salary. And I have too much junk and can’t afford to rent a storage unit so I ask a friend to store my stuff (bottom screenshot: click to enlarge).
Here are some of the things that we can adapt for engaging learning.
- You are personally involved in a real situation. It’s far less engaging to read about or interact with someone else’s situation. Or worse yet, be told stuff that is divorced from any specific situation.
- The choices are real. And they are messy.
- You aren’t given unrealistic guidance. In a lot of learning scenarios, you are given guidance about how to proceed OR the options are written so that the best way is obvious. How do we actually learn? Not from guidance but…
- You learn from consequences. The game lets you make decisions and then you experience the consequences, like in real life. The right approach often isn’t apparent until the consequences are felt.
The purpose of Spent is to help you understand what their clients are going through but it is also an effective learning experience.
Great post Patti!
I agree – realistic scenarios, challenging choices and intrinsic feedback are the key ingredients of effective elearning.
I love the choices that require you to ask a favor of a friend (e.g. store belongings, borrow money) by actually creating a post in your real Facebook account. You get a sense of how hard it is to really do this. Talk about realistic (intrinsic) feedback. It doesn’t get anymore visceral than that!
Rob Penn
This is a really well thought out scenario and it’s built beautifully in Flash BUT the choices on offer are extremely limited. The aim of the ‘game’ is to get you to run out of cash at some point. There is no real ‘intelligence’ (think simple AI) built into this and that’s the problem with so many e-learning scenarios – they offer limited choices and pre-packaged responses. That’s where a true game engine comes into play but of course our e-learning customers don’t have game budgets!
Still a great demo to show e-learning people though. Estimated cost to build? My guess is about $20,000…?
I think they do a good job of getting you to the desired ah-has with the limited choices. Agree it could be more lifelike with more complexity but don’t know if that’s needed in this case. Do you think the extra cost would be worth it?
Patti