Systemic Complexity, Learning, and the Role of Interactive Simulators

Interactive simulators are often used to help and accelerate learning in and about such complex systems. But there is little evidence in the literature about to what extent conceptual and ‘deep’ learning can be acquired by playing with interactive simulators. The main purpose of this research is to assess the extent of learning, by testing the ‘transfer’ of learning from one gaming situation to another. Transfer of learning is only possible by a conceptual understanding of the system. Thus, the learner should not only be able to show good performance in a given decision game, but should also learn the underlying structure. As an integral part of the research, proper measures of ‘systemic complexity’ will be defined. Several simulators with different contexts and levels of complexity will be built and experiments will be carried out to measure the subjects’ transfer of learning from one simulator to another.

This project is supported by Boğaziçi University Research Fund, project No. 09HA301D