Designing Exercises for Teaching and Analysis: Center for Applied Strategic Learning

Exercises are designed for purposes that can generally be collapsed into two overarching goals: teaching or analysis. The goal of teaching is usually to make theoretical lessons concrete and convey some aspect of the demands that a student might face in applying them. When we use an exercise as an analytical tool, in contrast, we use it as a model that represents some real world problem or, better, class of problems and uses participant actions to generate information about how at least one of the elements of that model impacts decisionmaking. In this article, we discuss design process and examine the ways in which exercise purpose impacts its form, particularly its scale. Perhaps controversially, we also cast doubt on the analytical utility of large-scale exercises.

Design Choices

Games successfully used for teaching purposes appear to incorporate a number of factors. They are rich and detailed enough to excite and compel participants. They have many different functional roles for participants, giving them some representation of the experience of performing those duties, the more realistic the better. They accurately convey the complexity of the real world and require them to make responses to sudden developments, the more unexpected the better. The lessons that participants learn and are to apply to the real …

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Publication information: Article title: Designing Exercises for Teaching and Analysis: Center for Applied Strategic Learning. Contributors: Not available. Magazine title: Joint Force Quarterly. Issue: 55 Publication date: October 2009. Page number: 173+. © 2000 National Defense University. COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale Group.

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