SpreadSims - its history and plans for the future!

Posted on | September 2, 2008 | by Pete Mazany |

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.

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