Virtual-U (SimUniversity) Now Available

Ben Sawyer writes "The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Virtual U project recently shipped a new version our university simulator. This software simulation game, available at www.virtual-u.org lets you play as president of a U.S. university. You choose how faculty spend time, allocate funds, and decide if you should give special admission to athletes. Version 2.0 improves the model, and adds new features. The product is supported through a grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The product runs on Windows 2000/XP/9X/ME. The software is being used by a number of university education programs, and is part of an overall project to improve thinking about how universities are managed." No word on if virtual-u features a "BSA attack" scenario.

Comments

Actually

[gatesh8r]

With The Sims, various Housing and Urban Development groups have been using this to simulate ideal conditions for people to live in since there has been a great deal of research done with the game to provide a more realistic situation with various designs.

It may seem to be a game these simulations, but in simulations it allows for a faster delivery of results statistically and realistically. Most of the time these simulations are money well spent. It doesn't mean that some stat geek isn't going to have some fun and poke around with things as we may do to have fun. You just can't do some things with certain senarios due to time and money.

Re:To make it truly realistic...

[56ker]

Does it also include :
students and staffers going on strike?
the IT project coming in over budget?
the completed exam papers being dumped in a river by the Post Office?
Thought it wasn't as realistic as that!

Re:The Sims

[Ben Sawyer]

No we don't let you switch to an open source IT infrastructure. As your point says, it's hard in a game to provide the same level of penultimate decision making that real-life allows.

This can be dealt with in a few ways:

1. Build a framework that lets you add over time ever more detail and realism

2. Build a game where many areas are conceptual and abstract so that people can explore core issues and imagine the details that make up their more general decisions (i.e. fill in your own backstory as you cut the IT budget because you're moving to open source IT tools).

3. Build some that has immense detail in it. (aka never finish.)

With Virtual U we went with a bit of the first 2 ideas. Ideally overtime with support we hope to continue progressing things toward ideas like more detail to the IT decisions given feedback and such however the original goal is to focus on the big issues and general decisions.

One other issue with the IT stuff that is important is to understand what the real impact is. Is there detailed analysis available saying what switching to an open-source infrastructure does to a universities IT budget? Does it really work? While we've undoubtably put some bias in our product, as we go forward and begin to add more detail like this we're inevitably going to add more bias to the model.

Also I think it can be safely assumed that in Virtual U some % of your overall IT budget is going to open source tools and infrastructure. It would be interesting to know what % of universities IT budgets are spent on such tools and services. Maybe the guys at Educause would know. I'll ask them.

Ben Sawyer