Simulations are artificial representations of real-world processes.[i] The affordance of computer- or technologically based simulations as active learning is significant. Students learn skills best by doing; some skills are difficult to learn in real-world situations. For example, a student pilot who spends time in a flight simulator can gain flying skills without endangering his or her own life or an instructor’s in a real flight situation. But a student who learns on a flight simulator has skills that someone who simply reads about flight—a much less active learning modality—lacks.

Long used by the military and propagated in business schools, simulations allow for students to cultivate a number of different skills at once, in situations well-suited to the performance of those skills in real life. The United States’ Department of Defense defines three categories of simulations that are useful to consider the ways in which they can produce learning[ii]:

Live—real people operating real systems in unreal conditions. So, for example, a student-driver operating a real car in a deserted parking lot, practicing signaling and turning, is engaged in a live simulation to learn driving.
Virtual—a real person operating a simulated system—so the earlier example of a student pilot in a flight simulator is a virtual simulation.
Constructive—More focused on organizational than individual learning, constructive simulations involve both simulated people and systems, and can be entirely computer-based.

One industry with significant learning happening in new ways thanks to technology-based simulations is health care. Many of us who learned CPR, even if we aren’t medical professionals, have learned using a technology-based simulator commonly known as Rescusci-Anne, visible in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HCjgF60jJs

Far more sophisticated technology gives medical schools and continuing medical education providers the opportunity to program more complex challenges for students to learn in a safe environment, such as a programmable newborn simulator that students monitor using real equipment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiKoB14Iv14

Research suggests that students clearly benefit from using simulators in medical education, and in both military training and business education as well. Computer-based simulation poses unique challenges and opportunities: its ubiquity makes more education available to more people, and as Kim and Watson suggest in their study of flow in business school simulations, simulations can sometimes better engage students’ attention—or create flow, as Csikszwnthihalyi calls the state of engagement many of us experience in computer games—in online settings than in live ones.[iii]

Interestingly,though, Kim and Watson found that at least for business students, while computer-based simulation participants had better flow than face-to-face participants, they did not master the concepts as well as face-to-face participants. And as Okuda, et. al. identified in 2009, medical professionals clearly improve their adherence to protocols by using simulations, but there isn’t overwhelming evidence that patients experience better outcomes as a result.[iv]

As the cost of technology used in the most sophisticated, lifelike simulations comes down, more of us may be learning more skills via simulations—and perhaps experiencing better healthcare, improved business service delivery, and increased public safety as a result.

[i] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3195067/#ref40

[ii]http://www.acqnotes.com/Attachments/DoD%20M&S%20Glossary%201%20Oct%2011.pdf

[iii] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/58c9/1786c8b78cf95a0644d9adfd4c27315e8cc5.pdf

[iv] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19642147