A number of years back I observed that my class of 8th grade girls seemed to be more worried about diet and weight than they had been in years previous. I contacted my good pal Chuck to see what he thought about creating a simulation that dealt with anorexia and eating disorders. I had the pleasure of meeting Chuck at a NASAGA conference and had participated in The Drinking Game and Alzheimer’s Disease: A Grieving Loss Simulation, both powerful, inspirational group activities.

As Chuck and I worked on the Daily Dining Simulation over email and phone exchanges we adjusted the focus, and instead focused eating patterns broadly, and created an activity that we successfully presented at NASAGA and that Chuck now has for sale on his site.

Creating this experience with Chuck reinforced some beliefs and taught me new lessons as well.

Simplify your Symbols

Much of what we do as designers is to boil messy complicated real life down into some translatable activities. As we selected meals for participants to dine on, it was tempting to become overly solicitous. Should breakfast include oatmeal AND granola AND cold cereal? What about sausage versus bacon? And so on… The point was not to provide every person with their favorite meal, but it was to provide representations of breakfast choices.

Reality can be Misrepresented

Momentarily as we designed, I got caught up in making sure that the calories of the foods selected were represented accurately. But then I remembered that the point wasn’t to represent calorie-counting, but instead to look at broader patterns of eating. It didn’t matter if one chip represented 100 calories, or if chips represented both calories or pounds. What mattered was if we could tell a story that chips represented something about your behavior.

Timing is Everything

The pace of an activity can make or break it. In this case, participants had certain assigned tasks to complete in a small timeframe which required concentrated effort, but there were also downtimes where participants had time to reflect, as well as interact with the other participants. There was variability of pace built into the flow of the activity, making a 90 minute-long session seem much shorter.

Choice, and the Choices Made, is Critical

There was plenty of opportunities for participants to make choices– in the foods they selected, how they chose to spend their downtime, whether they “cheated” or not. But that there were choices wasn’t the interesting part, it was more interesting what choices participants made, and what that revealed about themselves.

Concentrate on the Objective

Whenever the debrief conversation delved into how the simulation deviated from reality, we returned the conversation to the metaphor we were constructing… “So yeah, YOU typically eat granola in the morning and we didn’t have that choice… Were you able to find a substitute for that food? And did your eating patterns in the simulation reflect your real life eating patterns? Oh, okay… Does that make you think differently about your eating patterns?” It’s critical that as a facilitator, you keep the conversation focused on the objective, not on the details.

While these were lessons gained from a simulation, I think that they are applicable to many other kinds of educational activities as well. Please check out Chuck’s great simulations.