Decisions, Decisions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Decisions, Decisions is a 15-part educational role-playing video game series by Tom Snyder Productions, released from the 1980s to the early 2000s.[1][2] It has also been described as a "media-assisted Simulation Game" series.[3]
Each game puts the players (recommended to be a classroom) into a scenario based on actual facts and encourages them to come up with solutions.
An example is in the title Decisions, Decisions: Prejudice, in which the players take the role of the mayor of a tourist town, in which a newspaper has editorialised against a business trading racial memorabilia.[4] Students discuss the problem in teams, then enter their strategies into the computer, which advances the story, leading to 300 alternate paths.[4] Members of the team receive booklets from the perspective of an adviser to the decision maker, for instance in Decisions,[5] Decisions: The Environment, they could be a campaign manager, and environmentalist, a scientist, and an economist; players then debate this conflicting information to reach a justifiable compromise.[6]
The games encourage a five step critical thinking process:[7]
- Analyze the situation[8]
- Determine and prioritise goals[9]
- Consider their options[10]
- Make a decision[11]
- Examine the consequences[12]
Follow-up activities include: taking quizzes, drawing political cartoons, writing to state and federal legislators, seeing how others parts of the country voted on the issue, and research Web links.[13]
Development
While Tom Snyder originally created games that would suit the "one-computer classroom" model, this series was part of a new gaming focus of "choice-driven discussion generators".[4] The software was designed specifically to foster academic discussions within the classroom.[14] An online learning extension named Decisions, Decisions Online was also created.[15] David Dockterman, VP and Chief Academic Officer of Tom Snyder Productions, commented "the series grew out of my frustration teaching high school history during the Iranian hostage crisis. I thought it would be valuable for my students to discuss what was happening in the world."[16]
In 1999 a free service Decisions Decisions Online was released, which allowed students to discuss events taken from current headlines, with a new topic featured every month.[17][18] Hedrick Ellis, executive producer of Decisions, Decisions Online, was reluctant to introduce advertising, and instead noted that Tom Snyder Productions would eventually charge for the products.[19]
In 2002 Tom Snyder Productions was bought by Scholastic, and this series fell under Scholastic's Interactive Educational Software division.[20]
Realwordedtech suggested the series died out because it "was expensive to create and even more difficult for teachers to integrate an increasingly prescribed data-driven curriculum".[21]
