Dr Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan – In this hands-on session, Thiagi will present powerful principles that he learned through academic research and practical facilitation during the past 92 years of experience (that includes his previous lifetime).
The format of the session will use this procedure: facilitation of an activity, debriefing of the activity, identification of key principles, research evidence that supports the principles, and action planning for the application of the principles. The session will require and reward active participation by the audience members and it incorporate the principles it preaches.
Angeline Yee – This session will allow participants to experience a game scenario that puts trust, intention and integrity to test. In many social conditions, personal agenda and stakeholders’ needs constantly battle. The session involves a game that provides an opportunity to understand the way our society operates today, and what individuals should do to create a positive impact. The game is derived from a traditional experiential learning with a different approach to allow the learners to overcome their own morale dilemma and act in a way that is most useful to them.
Peter Harrington – Compressing 20 years into 45 minutes, the presenter will share key elements and themes behind the SimVenture story. The main focus of the presentation will be the issue of generating authentic learner curiosity (through effective simulation design), so that people discover what they don’t know – and what they don’t know they don’t know (hence the title). The session will also highlight guiding simulation design principles as well as critical practices when researching and working with prospects and clients. It will also examine the importance of engaging digital native students and the value of dynamic consequential learning as opposed to knowledge acquisition through static content.
Malar Villi Suppramaniam – The presentation is built around an activity to understand the interactions between Emotion, Brain and Body with some basic concepts in Neuroscience made easy. The activity aims to help us appreciate choices that we make on a day-to-day basis and the need to be holistic and contextual. In addition, the consequences of our choices gain more clarity with this activity, making it easy to comprehend, thus duplicate.
Kartic Vaidyanathan – The idea behind this session is to teach how simple board/card games can be built from scratch for any business learning objective. Participants will be grouped together in teams of 4 or 5 and identify a set of specific learning objectives. Each group is then made to play a few simple board/card games and reflect on the game mechanics. Additional mechanics will be taught too. The teams then build a board or card game using these mechanics. They will also be coached on factors to consider while building a good board/card game.
Associate Professor Dr Fitri Suraya Mohamad & Dr Jacey Lynn Minoi – Creating a powerful yet playful learning may be daunting for the inexperienced. Using PLAY cards, teachers/educators are guided through the thinking process in creating gamified lessons, using Game Design Thinking as the core methodology. The cards are constructed to initiate playful learning that would develop higher order thinking skills. Using customized Lego builds on the PLAY cards, triggers are provided through metaphors and storytelling.
Andrew Lau & Sufiz Suffian – With the advancement of methodologies and technology, one thing still remains elusive – having learning solutions that are sustainable at work. Most methodologies have tackled learning by treating symptoms of sustainability. An example of using technology is to create E-learning content. However, there has been little to no proper studies that suggest E-Learning is any better than the average classroom training. We need to get down to the root cause – sustainable learning is a problem of human psychology as opposed to technology or entertainment techniques. The session will dive into the 3 real obstacles why learning is not sustainable and how gamification science will resolve it.
Muhamad Zairulnizam Baharom & Nor Athirah bt Zainuddin – One of the challenge of building a simulation is to ensure the game mechanics do relate to the real world situations. In this session,
participants will witness how that was done for a new simulation design. The attempt was to bridge between game mechanics and content. This journey is never a linear path. Great game experience does not necessarily result in meaningful learning. This session explores how that meaningful link was established through multiple game testing, asking quality questions and engaging the thoughts of people outside the design team.
Pierre-Louis Genier – Learning game design in its simplest definition can be summed up as the creation of a tool aiming at goal setting and has the capability of generating a set of outcomes. Academic research in many ways is aligned to similar principles. It requires the design of tools for collecting data, an ideation stage to identify research questions, and set outcomes and a stage of experimentation. While being unique in many ways, learning game design and academic research share similar complexity and rely on creative and exploratory mechanics that can be framed to increase the change of success in the creation process and ease designers’/researchers’ work. This session will provide an overview of how academic research can inspire new methods and frameworks for learning game design and can help generate great game experiences. The presentation will also include discussions of how frameworks could bring, to new designers, a progressive and stimulation initiation to game design.
Gray Ham – Let’s talk about what Tabletop games actually are, their context beyond the scope of children’s playthings, and how it relates to gamification. Explore the concept of the noosphere, how making waves in it can affect the zeitgeist, and an individual’s weltanschauung. Design isn’t an art, but can make use of it to project ideas, or provide a framework for thought processes. Lastly, let’s look at the actual landscape of tabletop games in Malaysia, as well as regional opportunities.
Loh Mun Yee – ‘Same Same But Different’ is to bring awareness that when we have the same goal, we would most likely do it differently from the other person or team. It’s a game to bring light that being different has it merits. The game provides an opportunity to discover who we are and what inspires us to add value to the team. Participants will need to determine their key motivator and how they respond to the actions of others. This will enable better leverage on the individual’s strengths to meet the goal of the team.
Mr Sangga Sinnayah – Mr Sangga Sinnayah’s teaching journey started in the year 1983. Ever since from his very first day of teaching till now, he has never failed to inspire his students with his love for learning approaches. Mr Sangga has evolved from an ordinary teacher into assistant principal and finally a principal in 2009. He leaves significant changes in his every teaching phase and never gets tired to explore and travels extra miles to give the best for his students. He always believes a teacher must get his/her students excited about learning and make them look forward to attending to school. This belief has led him to transform SJKT Sungai Ara into a student-centered school by applying fun teaching and learning approaches towards a journey of sustainable education.
Malaysian Simulation and Gaming Conference 2019 