 Hello everyone and welcome to the 2.30 to 3.00 p.m. early session of the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. You know in this session we are pleased to introduce the presentation, Leveraging 3D Environments for Soft Skills Training. Our speakers are Bruce Gross, who is Cooper Swizzle, and Karla Kincaid, Yoshikawa. If you were at our earlier session you'd know that Bruce ran a five-year 3D-based training program before retiring. He brings a broad spectrum of experience and training and enjoys using and sharing knowledge gained from his 15-plus years of training experience. Karla has worked as an organization development and training consultant for many years. She continues to use many technologies in her work and sees 3D games and environments as powerful tools to enhance online and remote learning. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the session, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session you may send tweets to at OpenSimCC with the hashtag pound OSCC23. Welcome everyone. Karla, Bruce, let's begin the session. Thank you. Welcome to Leverage 3D Environments for Soft Skills Training. I'm Cooper Swizzle, as Lyrgis mentioned, otherwise known as Bruce Gross. And I'm Karla Kincaid, Yoshikawa in Real Life and in 3D. We're from training in the 21st century, which we'll refer to as T21C. And you can learn more about us by coming to booth 13 in Region 3. Okay, I better go forward. At training in the 21st century, we focus on soft skills training for professional development, which can involve personal growth and development as well as professional. Today we'll be highlighting some of the distinctive advantages of 3D environments for this kind of transformative learning. In 2010, we saw challenges in corporate training whether they involved face-to-face sessions, webinars, or self-paced e-learning. In face-to-face soft skills training sessions tried to cram too much into marathons. They had week-long training off-sites where participants didn't have time to internalize the new concepts or to practice new behaviors. So most of what they learned was quickly forgotten once they returned to the work site. Leverage is bored people silly. And most of the people thought they can multitask their ways through a session. So they didn't pay attention. And self-paced e-learning couldn't incorporate the power of learning from and with colleagues that is so important for adult learners. Instead, they were click, click, get it done, check the box for completion processes. Retention and actual utilization suffered in all three of these training methods. Next slide. T21C's approach relies on 3D environments, unique, unique ability to make people feel like they're together in the same place, where they can act and interact together. We can create controlled learning environments to ensure participants are both intrigued and engaged while staying focused. We use the terrain and environments we create to reinforce content and to enhance retention and attention. Environments can add drama and even humor to the content, both of which aid learning. Can you show the next slide, Bruce? The environments also add spatial memory to the learning. The sense of being in a specific space can be powerful for retention and the sense of being present with others makes it easier for people to stay attentive and engaged during a class. The two environments that you're seeing are both involved in a change management course. And the way we've used the environments here is you see this mountainous terrain with the sea of uncertainty that in some ways reinforces some of what they're learning in the content. On the other side, you see the resisting change, which we teach in a lava pit or sort of reproduction of hell. And that's a bit of a humorous aspect to it. So we use, this helps to reinforce the memory of that when having an environment that corresponds to and symbolizes or goes along with what they're learning helps them retain it better. So we also use scenarios to teach concepts and catalyze discussions, which is important for adult learning and retention. And we have a simple demonstration of something we might incorporate into a training session to show you. So in accordance with maintaining control of the environment, we've hidden this scene, but now we want you to focus on it. So, Franz, if you can put out the sexual harassment. Yes, over on the left side of the stage. Thank you. So this is a scene that we've used in sexual harassment prevention training. We want to know if you think this shows sexual harassment. So if you'll zoom in on the scene, what we'd like you to do is type a Y for yes, if you think it's sexual harassment. Oh dear. Type an N for no, if you don't think it's sexual harassment. And type a question mark if you think it's a maybe. And you can do that in the chat. Bruce, can you, are you zoomed in on the scene? I don't know if it's my um. Yes, and they're right there. It looks good. Okay, fine. My camera in a little strange. And they're saying it's hard to know if I'm seeing them sit there. They are close. That's correct. Kayaker thinks it's a no. Lyra thinks maybe it's family. Frank thinks it's a no. Lisa thinks it's a no. Aida doesn't know for sure. So the thing that we're trying to point out here is this is a scene that can generate discussions about what is very what is a very ambiguous and difficult topic. It generates valuable and enlightening discussions. So what we would do from here. After we would ask students in the class, what do they think we would then have a discussion to find out? Why did they think the way they thought was this based on perception and things of that nature? So, so in this case, we're using animus characters created for us by Kim star or virtual vignette. This is known as a simple animation. Carla. Yeah, we wanted to be able to create more complex scenarios using these kinds of characters but with synchronized animations. So here's a we're going to show you a video demonstration that we'd hope to do live, but we didn't have time to make the changes to have it run smoothly here for today. So here's the video. I think somebody's going to show the video. Is have it an open discussion and an interactive class, but it's not really possible to do that in the presentation. So we'd appreciate to getting your responses to it from a few questions we want to ask. So our first question is, do you think this is an effective dance team from what you just saw? So we'd ask you to type in team then why for yes and inferno? Our second question is, does it look like they have a shared understanding of what to do? So type in shared and then why for yes and inferno? The third question is, do you think they have communicated effectively with each other and put in communicated then why or in? And the fourth question is, do you think this team is collaborative and so put in collaborative and then why or in? So just to get your response to what you saw. So thank you for your responses and what we're basically trying to show you here is that this would be a discussion that we would have along the pathway or many of you have seen the caves that we build. We can do this in a cave, but it's a way to incorporate the context of what they're learning in a discussion instead of doing, you know, just a PowerPoint presentation that people just sit and listen to or, you know, just a regular lecture. So when we create our trainings, it's all about not only just being immersive, but keeping them engaged and discussion is one of the most important things when you're doing 3D training. And we could use this kind of scenario for courses on communication, on teamwork or team building and collaboration, as well as on leadership or cultural differences because all of those things would be elements that would come out in an open discussion. So we use discussions in which learners share from their own experience, perspectives and solutions. And one of the values of that is that participants then are learning from each other rather than from just the trainer. They can reveal so they engage the adult audiences and learners in ways a simple presentation can't. And they increase retention as learners actively connect with what they hear and see and connecting it to their own life experience. So what we wanted to do was we wanted to be able to create a more effective and not just a simple simulation. That's where the Animaster comes in. So we worked with Christine Nin of Ninja Services to create what we're calling the Animaster tool. And it enables us to set up and time the actions of the Animash characters so they synchronize precisely and tell us whatever story we want. We're looking forward to sharing this new capability in the Kitely Market in early 2024. Let's see. And just to answer any questions real quickly, the Animaster, so Kim's Animash have things in them to make them move around. But in one place, the Animaster will let you take that a step further by, as you saw in the dance, we could make them dance. When we did OS Fest a couple of months ago, we had them, we had different ones for tours to take them through the tours of our exhibits. So it takes the place of having to have someone there. Okay. Now, click. Yeah. We also use individual and group activities or games in which learners are challenged to act to actively use concepts for teaching. One example is this box game. It can be used in real time group activities collaboratively, competitively, or both depending on the participants. And it can also be used as a self-paced individual activity. The activity is also designed so we can put it in a wide, we can use it for a wide range of topics. So in the image you see it's being used for a course on bullying where people are asked to make, to match specific behaviors to different types of bullying. You notice another game that we have down in the corner there, that is based on people feeding fish a certain kind of food based on their level of readiness to do certain tasks. So that was a fun game. But again, we always try to make sure that we can multi-purpose our games. Excuse me. We're also working with a client who's using this game to create a cyber security learning activity. Bruce, can you advance this slide? Oh, I thought I did. Sorry. In this case, it involves matching specific activities to a framework for cyber security developed by the National Institute of Technology on how to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber attacks. It's important to us that that these tools be flexible because we don't, you know, we like to be able to repurpose them. It's also important to us that they be simple to use for the user. So we'll go into that more later. But now we get the next activity, Bruce. Okay. This is my dog, Oscar. And so what we're going to do is we're showing you that there are four. Oh, hold on a second. I got to bring it out. Bear with me one second. Cute little guy, isn't he? Yeah, this might not. Okay. So the basic idea is when the game is over with, as you can see, it will say, congratulations, you're correct. We have four boxes here or four activities. One is for him to sleep, eat, drink, and play with his bone and take a bath. The bath will not work because once what you do is you click on the box that you want to put on the platform, click the platform, the box will float over. If it's not the right box to go on the platform, it will come back and it'll give you an error message in your nearby chat. So it's okay, Franz. I got through it. I think everyone understands the principle. Well, we left out one important thing. There's a reset button that usually goes with it too, that once we click it, everything goes back to starting position. So it's very easy to set it up again for the next use. So that's a real, it's one of my favorite things about it. And if you notice, this one had only four boxes. I'm going to go backwards on the slides. This game has, I believe, 12 to 16 boxes. And the cybersecurity one has 18 to 22 boxes. So we can set the game up for whatever the learning activity is meant to be. And if you notice the number of platforms, we have set it up so that we would have different groups who would each have a set of platforms and boxes and they could compete with the other groups, but work collaboratively among themselves. So it can be used as in any number of ways for people, depending on whether they love to be competitive or they love to be collaborative, we can accommodate that. Okay. Here's a few other things that we offer. So, Karla? Yeah, well, I want to say that game plus the many other things we do, we really focus on trying to make them very, very easy for newbies in the 3D worlds because we never know what combination, but most often we have people who have not been in 3D before or have been in 3D very little. So that's why the box, all you have to do is click the box, then click the platform and you're done as a learner. This show an example of some other kinds of things that we do. If you notice the picture on the left here, there's a little cobbler in the corner on the left side of the picture. You click him and you get a text message coming in in local chat and he is asking a question in this case and then we can alter the number of selections or choices the person has and based on what they choose, they will get different information. It can be something that gives them more information about the topic that corrects them if they made a mistake or we've also used this for a kind of a mystery quest or a treasure hunt kind of thing where they get a clue if they get the right answer and they don't get a clue if they don't. So it can be fun that way. The picture on the right is just something where people walk along and something pops up. In this case, this is about facial recognition and the people click on the little black dots on the column next to it. Each one corresponds to some sort of emotion and they can choose what emotion they think it is and then they'll get an answer based on whether they get the right answer. So that's a simple process. Again, all you have to do is walk and click here. So this next one are two games. They're the same game just changed around. This one on the left as you can see is for bullying. The one on the right is for sexual harassment prevention. There's boxes that they can click on because these are multiple choice or true and false questions and based on what answer you're supposed to be giving, the boxes either say have Y or N and the multiple choice boxes have A, B, C or D. And with these, this is set up for actual real-time training. The walking along a path and clicking on different characters to get in some kind of question or answer situation, it can be done as either a self-paced learning or as a real-time group learning process. This one is again walking along the path and having information pop up or walking through in this case a cave and clicking on information where we might get note cards or we might give local chat messages depending on whether we want them to be able to retain that information and come back and refer to it or we want them to remember it. So we want to thank you all for attending and want to know does anyone have any questions before we close? Type them in the chat and thank you for all your responses earlier. Any questions? Well, I want to thank you Bruce and Carla. Oh, let me see. I don't see any questions at this time. I want to thank you for such an informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you want to check out the conference.opensimilar.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which begins at 3.30 p.m. in this keynote region after a 30-minute break and it's entitled State of the Metaverse. Also, we want to encourage you to check out the amazing Boo 13 that our presenters have and all their content in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information and also explore the hypergrid resources in OSCC Expo 2 and the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the Expo regions. Thank you again to Bruce and Carla and to you, the audience. And thank you all. Thank you.