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How we have been going about developing branching interactions for STEM
I’ve been holding back on developing an authoring tool for STEM, mainly because I want to develop more experience in planning, writing and developing these interactions.
The first couple I developed focus on using sticky notes on a whiteboard. This had some positives and negatives.
| Positives | Negatives |
|---|---|
| The workshop sessions are a lot of fun | The results had to be written up afterwards. |
| You have a restricted amount of space. This means that you can’t explode into hundreds of branches. | The restricted space often meant that the interaction ended up being too simple. |
| There was a lot flexibility, e.g. to make a ‘looping branching’ it was just a matter of drawing a line. | The final whiteboard often ended up becoming a mess. |
Using role-play
Lifeline Tasmania was interested in how STEM could be used for training and consulting. During a meeting with them I sat there and said “we need to map this all out” and their response was “no we can do with role-plays”. At this stage, I really wasn’t too sure about how this was going. I turned up with a video camera, because I was willing to give it a try. A lot of Lifeline’s training is done with role-playing.
The way we went about this was:
- I explained to the participants the idea of the branching stories and how it was going to be used.
- The client acted out his problem, and the telephone counselling used 1 of 4 different styles of responses. I videotaped this with the plan of just using the audio.
- What was really amazing was that when it came to doing the other different styles of response the person that was role-playing the client developed a “structure” to the conversation, like making repeated statements. This made it achievable to weave the 4 different styles of responses together, into a structure where the learner could move between each of the styles of approaches.
With interactions around conversations, e.g. customer service and other people skills, I think role-playing is great, and it can be used as research tool and as a core part of the development. It may not be a process that can be used to develop every branching interaction.
The process we now use is
- Explore some big picture questions
- Where is the experience going to happen?
- What are the critical decision points?
- What are the possible outcomes? It’s better to direct everyone down one
- path instead of having a single ‘right way’ and ‘wrong way’.
- Fill in the details.
- The details of the branches and choices are developed into a mind-mapping tool. I have been using Freemind. We colour-code the bits that are statements and the bits that are choices and draw lines or make notes where non-linear linkages are.
Depending on the content at this point, I’ve been able to develop the interactions from just that knowledge for the subject matter experts to check.
What has been great about this is that I’m now 100% sure that the authoring tool needs to work like common mind-mapping tools. I thought that this might be the case, but it’s good to be sure.
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