Designing Decision-Tree Simulations (TreeSims)

Bernie Dodge - Draft - November 12, 2001

This is a preliminary draft of advice on how to design an educational simulation based on a sequence of decisions and their consequences.

1. Decide on your instructional intentions by listing the concepts, procedures, facts and principles you want to teach.
2. List situations from the realm to be simulated that would require knowledge of those things and list them with each content item.
   
3. List separately concepts, facts, principles, procedures that are interesting but not critical for learners to know.
   
4. Decide on the initial conditions. What is the problem situation when the simulation begins?
   
5. Decide on the most desirable end state for the simulated world.
6. Decide on what role the player will perform. Who are they? Will different players take on different roles?
   
7. Create a path of decision points and consequences that leads most directly from the initial condition to the end state. Use a flowchart (done in Inspiration) to represent this path and give each decision point an identifying number.
   
8. Add paths that result from less desirable decisions (by adding choices and consequences). Give these additional decision points an identifying number that begins with the point at which they diverged from the optimal path or add these to the descriptions of existing events.
   
9. Add events that heighten the drama and the importance of the consequences
   
10. Add events that include the interesting non-critical content, or add these to the descriptions of existing events.

Nomenclature:
Decision points contain choices
Choices lead to consequences and more choices