Steve Neiderhauser

Learn to play. Play to learn.

If you've ever studied educational psychology, you probably know of Jean Piaget and his stages of cognitive development. Still, there's more to Piaget than his stages.

In "Constructing Knowledge and Transforming the World" Edith Ackermann writes of three other lessons she learned from working with Piaget; here's lesson 1:

Teaching can’t ever be direct. Children don’t just take-in what is being said. Instead,
they interpret, or translate, what they hear in the light of their knowledge and experience.
Willingly or unwillingly, that is, they transform the input to fit their level of
understanding, This occurs whether we like it or not. A more radical formulation of
lesson 1 would be to say that learning does not occur as a result of teaching or, in Piaget’s
own provocative terms ‘whatever you tell a child, you won’t allow her to discover it by
herself’.

Building on the work of Piaget, Seymour Papert has pioneered the concept of learning through play -- creating your own knowledge by playing and building with physical objects such as LEGO blocks. This research has been used in computer games (for example, Sim City) to enrich the learning experience.

I'm not a teacher, I'm an awakener."

-- Robert Frost

Lens for Serious Games

While working on a Serious Games project, I found Richard Carey's Squidoo Lens for Serious Games.

He pulls together the latest blogs, books, and research in this field.

Flexible Products

Seth writes of flexibility -- in your marketing plan, in your products, and in your life. Instead of ripping apart a product after it's built, build options into your products from the ground up.

Truth is, an options framework sets the stage for flexible actions.

tags: Marketing, Product Management

Storymaking and Games

Hopelab has produced an entertaining video game -- Re-Mission -- that educates cancer patients about their treatment.

In a video they tell us that during development of the game, the main character was changed from a spaceship to a female character -- Roxxie, a fully-armed Nanobot who seeks out and destroys cancer cells throughout the human body.

Storymaking tells us that the more we like the hero or heroine, the more we will follow her on her journey. In addition, I'm willing to bet that patients are also more likely to visualize the cancer cells dying.

tags: Presentation

Customers driving innovation

In the Harvard Business Review article, Customers as Innovators, authors Stefan Thomke and Eric von Hippel write of a new technique that some companies are using to develop new products.

You see, the traditional product development life cycle -- where the product company requests requirements, builds a prototype, and seeks customer feedback -- is a time-consuming process.

Further complicating the process, most customers are unable to speak their needs and desires into being -- until they see and play with the prototype ("Learning by doing") customers are unsure of what they want.

So some companies are abandoning the effort to understand what customers want faster than a staled car on the expressway of marketing. Instead, these companies are arming customers with prototyping kits. LSI Logic, for example, provides a prototyping kit that allows customers to design, prototype, and test custom semiconductor chips. One of the benefits? Designs are created faster because the customer performs the design-prototype-test cycle.

What are the capabilities needed to breathe life into a customer prototyping kit?

• Enable people to complete a series of design cycles followed by learning by doing.
• Tools must be user friendly.
• Must contain libraries of useful components and models, allowing people to focus on the innovation of design.
• Tool kits must contain information about capabilities and limits of production process, allowing the model to align with reality.

In the final analysis, the authors describe the potential benefits when customers steer innovation:

The approach also holds the power to turn markets topsy-turvy, creating and shifting value at three separate levels: the industry as a whole, companies that implement the technology, and customers that take advantage of it.

tags: Marketing, Product Management

Serious Games

A month ago, I researched market trends in the area of online learning and found that there's a great deal of buzz around a concept called E-Learning 2.0. E-Learning 2.0 moves past computer-based instruction and embraces media that allows students and teacher to interact. Imagine that. Stephen Downes highlights the latest advances and thinking in his E-Learning 2.0 presentation.

Yes... wikis, blogs, and podcasts can make learning interactive and fun. Still, games may prove to be the ultimate learning machine. BusinessWeek runs an article about how companies are using online games to collaborate on product design and marketing.

For a number of reasons, using games in business converges with other trends:

• College students entering the workforce have rewired their minds through video games and other technologies to the point where learning through games is second nature.
• By teaching to standardized tests, public schools have bored students to tears.

If you had a choice between computer-based instruction and a game, which would you choose? Serious games combine entertainment and learning to teach a variety of concepts -- collaboration, economics, leadership. Just as website prototyping tools and Serious Play are changing the way we develop software, serious games are changing the way we learn.