Role-Playing Simulations

Many instructors—in K-12 settings and also in higher education—are embracing the move towards experiential learning (Cassidy, Charles, & Slotta, 2019). Simulation-based teaching approaches can immerse learners in complex contexts, such as those that imitate a system, phenomenon, or process (Lean, Moizer, Towler, & Abbey, 2006). Such approaches allow students to actively explore complex scenarios in settings where they may gather information, discuss and debate ideas, pose hypotheses, and arrive at conclusions with support from instructors and peers. Many disciplines such as health sciences, business, and law have a tradition of using educational simulations (Cook, Dow, & Hammer, 2017). But the idea of simulations as a teaching tool is gaining momentum and simulations are increasingly being seen outside of disciplines that have traditionally embraced them (Carnes, 2018).

Different types of simulations for learning are emerging within the learning sciences, including participatory simulations (c.f., Colella, 2000) and simulations for collective inquiry (c.f., Moher, 2006). Another approach that is rising in prominence within classroom learning environments is that of role-based simulations, where participants act out the role of a character who is embedded in a specific context or situation (Cook et al., 2017; Lean et al., 2016). Role-based simulations are similar to participatory and collective inquiry simulations in that students take on a role within a larger simulation context to explore some issue. The difference is that in role-based simulations, participants take on well-defined, identity-based roles and follow a set of rules specific to the context of the simulation that allow them to advance towards a specific goal or desired outcome (Cook et al., 2017). Through interactions with roles and elements of the simulation, participants are able to represent aspects of the issue under study and influence the direction of the narrative.

Role-based simulations also have roots in serious games, in which designers lay out “an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement” (Abt, 1970, p. 9). Within serious games, participants can anticipate and experience the effects or consequences of action in an ill-defined problem space (Raybourn, Deagle, Mendini, & Heneghan, 2005). Serious educational games have similar qualities, but they also allow instructors to target specific learning goals and attempt to connect educational content with real-world scenarios (Annetta, 2010). Simulations are a form of serious games that allow participants to be active agents within a scenario and take actions consequential to the activity (Wright-Maley, 2015). Simulations allow students to engage in life-like scenarios that might otherwise be too costly or dangerous to reproduce and implement. In simulations that are enacted within learning contexts, learners can assume active roles through which phenomena are revealed (Wright-Maley, 2015). Simulations for learning also connect to Shaffer’s (2004) notion of epistemic games, in which participation within a simulation environment prepares students for engagement with real-world environments, by allowing them to consider real-world problems through the epistemic frame that they experienced within the simulation.