SymComm http://www.spreadsims.net people, passion, power Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:12:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 en SpreadSims - its history and plans for the future! http://www.spreadsims.net/?p=31 http://www.spreadsims.net/?p=31#comments Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:29:44 +0000 Pete Mazany http://www.spreadsims.net/?p=31 For many years, my passion has been making learning more interesting, powerful and fun. The techniques that I have enjoyed the most have been experiential, where people learn by doing and simulation, whether computerised or not, captures this well.

When I first started working on simulations about 20 years, I wanted to create a system that was flexible enough that it could easily be modified to suit any organisation. With a group of talented students, we started out by creating one simulation about a bicycle manufacturer and thought that it would be easy to modify and scale. It was not. We then started to work on a system that would allow a person who was reasonably good at math to create a simulation. We created a language, a compiler, a screen builder, a database, and report engine. It was all too much and after 4 years we gave up.

Then with the passing of another year, we realised that the spreadsheet was possibly one of the most flexible calculation engines ever created and so we created a plug-in in to Excel, that would make it easier to create multi-person, multi-user simulations.We used this first with AXA to create a simulation customised for their financial brokers. This evolved into a language and a methodology that we trademarked SpreadSims, where a spreadsheet-user could design, build, test and publish a simulation on the Internet for other people to use. And using this we created a more general simulation called the Great Restaurant sim that was of use in teaching business and team skills to a 1st-year university business class.

This was a big hit and we always knew that for this to grow, we would need to open it up to others to create their own sims. We felt that a great place to start would be the students who had already completed the Great Restaurant sim and who wanted to use this to make a difference in their schools with an approach that gave valuable business lessons, team and leadership skills and was fun. So we have designed SchoolSims so that it can be easily used by students to create a small business for themselves to that they can do this.

And that is where we are right now.

The next step is to empower these people to make a difference with their schools and to serve this community by making it easy, fun and rewarding to do so. As we do this they will be able to guide the development of the site and tools so that it best works for them.

Stay tuned for how this evolves over the next few months.

]]> http://www.spreadsims.net/?feed=rss2&p=31 RPG and Business Simulation http://www.spreadsims.net/?p=26 http://www.spreadsims.net/?p=26#comments Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:08:09 +0000 Csanad Novak http://www.spreadsims.net/?p=26 When years ago I arrived to New Zealand, I didn’t really hope to be as lucky as I became.
My life in Hungary was defined by two things, Informatics and Role Playing Games. I started to study informatics when 8 bits computers were count as modern ones, internet was unknown in Eastern-Europe, at the beginning of a really exciting era. There weren’t available unlimited resources for us when the memory and the speed of the processor were compensate by ingenuity and infinite exactitude. The Role Playing Games started to conquest at those times as well, and I fell in love with them early, however sadly – or even just fortunately – they weren’t reachable neither in Hungary or on Hungarian language. That is how it happened that I changed my career in informatics to in a game developer and the game I developed is the most successful RPG in Hungary ere now, were moving community with more then hundred-thousand players at the top of it’s career.
It may be unusual that I speak of Role Playing Games as a programmer of business simulation’s developer company, but to think about it further the parallelism is more obvious than it seems at first sight: The Role Playing Game is nothing else but simulation. The gamesystem’s aim to simulate the events of a fantasy world as good as possible, which events at the same time are controlled by strict rules. A well made RPG session teaches you to teamwork and strategy-thinking, and doing it in the way of entertaining and playing. And at this stage I would like to refer back to Spreadsims which our purpose to do exactly this: teach while entertaining, of course on a different, even more useful and efficient level.
When years ago I chose New Zealand to be my new home, I didn’t really hope to be as lucky as I became and I could work with the combination of those two thing which interest me the most. These are the wonders of the life which are worth for make sacrifices.
Now that the Spreadsims, the business simulation’s new platform has been born and is over it’s first successful steps, I can look into the future even with more hope. Here, in the blog of the company you can follow it’s growing up, and – by our hopes – the steps of it’s conqueror journey, like this, a bit personal and immediate way.
Up to the adventure!

]]> http://www.spreadsims.net/?feed=rss2&p=26