Category: Storytelling + Learner Engagement

Storytelling Techniques for Complex Simulations, Part Two

by Cindy.McCabe

If you’re an instructional designer who loves a good novel or a compelling movie, writing for complex simulations gives you a great opportunity to flex your own creative writing muscle. The first part of your job, of course, is to get a firm grasp on the business drivers, the performance gap, and the training objectives, and develop a brilliant simulation design. Then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get into the nitty-gritty of the story.

In Part One of this post, I offered some tips for character and plot. Below I’ll dig a little deeper into two techniques you might remember from creative writing classes: foreshadowing and climax.

Give Them a Taste: Foreshadowing

In complex simulations, learners need to make decisions based on multiple choices available to them. They need enough information to make those decisions, but not so much that you’ve given away the answers. The best way to do this is to determine what the decision is and what the possible outcomes are in advance. Then, work backwards to identify what information you need to disclose to learners. Disclose only so much information that learners can reasonably foresee the consequences of their decisions.

Here’s an example: let’s say we have a simulation that focuses on how to handle difficult situations as a supervisor. The learner will need to make a series of decisions about what to say to an employee (let’s call her Judy) in a one-on-one conversation. As preparation, the learner will speak with a few of Judy’s colleagues to better understand her performance and impact on the team. During these conversations, the learner will glean bits of information about Judy’s personality and her reactions to different situations. When the time comes for the one-on-one conversation with Judy, the learner won’t know exactly how she will respond and react, but the previous conversations allow the learner to foresee how Judy might respond, which informs the learner’s decisions.

Avoid the Crash and Burn: Climax

What makes simulations such an effective training tool? Well, one reason is simulations offer learners a safe environment to practice – and yes, make mistakes. Learners can try out different techniques without being afraid of harming relationships with colleagues or customers, messing up a system, or deleting important data. Learners learn as much from their mistakes as they do from getting it right!

As discussed in Part One, just before the end of the story, we want to introduce the major obstacle and allow learners to use what they’ve learned to bring the story to a positive conclusion. The build-up of drama and major conflict is the “climax” of the story. It should be a challenge to complete, and it’s probable that they will make mistakes. Here’s the key: we don’t want to leave them in a “crash and burn” situation, which is demotivating. We want to give them an opportunity to recover from their mistakes.

In video games, gamers attempt to finish a series of “levels” to successfully complete the game. And in many games, if you mess up too badly, you die. Imagine if that was the end of the story! You’d throw your controller down and give up on the game.

Instead, you get to restart and try that level or that challenge again. Take a cue from video games in your complex simulation and allow the learner to try again, or give them a path to recover and learn from their mistakes.

Karl Kapp, author of The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, offers 12 great ideas for how to help learners who don’t “win” in his blog post, “The Emotional Toll of Instructional Games.”

How have you used foreshadowing in your complex simulations? How have you provided ways for learners to recover from their mistakes? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please share in the comments.

Photo Credit: Mukumbura via Compfight cc

Flex Your Creative Muscle: Storytelling for Complex Simulations

by Cindy.McCabe

Character, plot, foreshadowing, climax… with a quick glance, you might think this post is about the Great American Novel or the next hit indie drama. No, I’m not writing to you from a tiny room in Paris hunched over a typewriter, nor am I in a slick writer’s room in Hollywood. Yet writing for complex simulations does require dusting off those techniques you learned back in creative writing class. After you’ve internalized the business and instructional objectives and gotten a solid grasp on the subject matter, it’s time to turn your inner writer loose. Here are some tips from my experience to help you along.

Got To Be Real: Characters in Simulations

Think about who the “stars” of your story will be. (Let’s see… Brad Pitt… Oh, excuse me, got carried away there.) Put your learner in the position of the protagonist — the main character and the “hero” of the story. Then write the parts for one or more antagonists that pos2ee conflicts. Though the name “antagonist” might conjure up certain feelings (as in the word “antagonistic”), these characters aren’t meant to be evil. They simply have different perspectives or goals that create challenging situations for the learner.

Characters need to feel real in the context of the learner’s experience. By building character profiles, you can create backstories for each of them. These backstories will help explain their unique perspectives and views that are different from the protagonist’s. You’ll want to keep these brief, but they do add depth and richness to the story.

Characters’ actions should remain true to their perspectives. Referring to each character’s backstory as you write will help you frame how he or she should respond in a given situation. A character that behaves in a certain way shouldn’t suddenly change behavior. That’s not to say that a character can’t change his or her mind about something. Hey, we all have realizations and epiphanies, right?

Building the Story: Plot

Think beginning, middle, and end. At the beginning of the story, introduce the learner to the simulation’s setting, most or all major characters, and the overall situation and objective. Bring in your challenges or obstacles in the middle of the story: There may be several minor obstacles to overcome that build toward the major obstacle (the climax, which I’ll describe in a future post). Then use the end to provide a conclusion to the story: Recap how the learner resolved the challenge and reinforce what was learned. Getting creative, you might include “credits” or brief snapshots of the characters’ futures (“where they are now?”)!

Achieve balance when creating obstacles for the learner. Overcoming obstacles should be attainable, but not easy. For example, you might require that learners look up the answer in a knowledge management system, or in a document they’ve picked up along the way in the simulation. (This type of challenge also gives learners exposure to and practice using a tool or reference material they need to use back on the job.) In this case, you want to give enough information to ensure learners can find the answer, but not provide the direct link or page number where the information can be found.

How have you used characters and plot devices in storytelling for simulations?

Check out Part Two, where I discuss foreshadowing and climax!

Tell Me a Story: How to Captivate and Educate Your Audience

by Catherine Davis

What makes content engaging? Courses need to sparkle, or your message goes in one ear and out the other. We add stories to help capture the imagination. That’s a great start. Then we add an avatar coach to guide us and provide narration. Nice idea. It feels like we need to connect the dots and have our avatars act as characters playing out those stories, however.

As a strong advocate of wheel enhancements and not reinvention, I did a bit of research on telling stories within e-learning courses. (This research was done on the Internet from my comfy recliner. See my earlier blog for details on my tumultuous affair with research.) I wanted to find some formulas for creating storylines and developing characters within courses, even if I had to draw from script-writing techniques used by the entertainment industry. Low and behold, I was able to find exactly what I needed — even streamlined for the e-learning audience! The following is a brief summary of a fantastic article by Karen Westmoreland Luce, called “Creating Great Stories to Enhance eLearning.”

There are four, basic, building blocks of any story in an e-learning course:

1) Triggering event. The triggering event is always the first and most-essential element in any story. It’s the problem — and it’s used to set up the context of the story. Sometimes it’s part of the story, and sometimes it’s the background of the story. Answering these questions will usually give you the basis for your triggering event:

  • What is the problem that this lesson is supposed to address?
  • What is the learning objective for this course?
  • Who is my audience for this course?
  • What details about this event will make it familiar to learners and their real-world situation?

2) Plot. Plot lines are often recycled. How many times have we seen such recycling in movies or on TV? Cop dramas since the 1970s come to mind for me! You can use the same basic scenario or plot over and over to illustrate a point. The time and place, characters, and details change. We just have to fill in the right details to our audience and our situation. Basic plots have five main components:

  • The situation or problem tells why you are telling the story in the first place; for our purposes, this is usually our triggering event.
  • The rising action is where most of the story occurs. This is where we introduce our characters, outline the problem and details, and build to decision point.
  • The decision point is where the character is forced to take one course of action or another. In e-learning, the decision point is directly tied to your learning objectives.
  • The desired course of action reinforces the objective and goal of the course — the behaviors that we want the learner to demonstrate on the job.
  • The outcome or resolution provides the closure for the story.

The original article offers a great brainstorming worksheet for these five components to help you walk through the process.

3) Characters. In creating characters for your avatars, you must give your learner a good sense of the character, but do so without sliding into stereotypes.

Using archetypes can be very effective in helping you work out your characters. In literature, we often see classic archetypes: the hero, the villain, the goddess, and the innocent. In e-learning courses, we see archetypes such as the novice, the expert, the mentor, and the skeptic.

Once you have a framework for your character’s purpose in the story, it’s easier to fill in the details of who that character really is. The original article provides another great worksheet; this one for developing characters.

4) Setting. The setting is the visual backdrop for the avatar characters in your course. You should work with your creative designers to generate the right visual environment. Again, look to your target audience and learning objectives to help figure out the setting. Make a rough sketch and include details you would see in the scene. (Annotated boxes in PowerPoint® are adequate for you non-artist types like me.) Challenge yourself to draw something representing all five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Visit the setting and create a description. For example, if it is a retail setting, visit some local stores and write down notes. Listen to the conversations between customers and store associates.

The type of story you are using and the learning objectives for that story will determine how much of each building block you need. Keep in mind that all courses are a stage, and all avatars are merely players.