With one program, for example, you can simulate events of the French Revolution, exploring how variations in certain conditions might have changed the course of the revolution. With another program, you can travel through a simulated world at relativistic speeds, allowing you to experience phenomena that are inaccessible in traditional physics labs. Most existing simulation programs are designed for the traditional paradigm of one student at one computer controlling a few objects on the screen. But simulations are certainly not limited to that paradigm. Indeed, researchers are now beginning to work on new forms of simulations that might be called collaborative simulations.
Collaborative simulations fall into two broad categories.
In the first category, students learn through collaboration, working together to design and explore simulated worlds. In this paper, I describe examples of both approaches. In collaboration at a computer, several students work together at a single computer, jointly developing ideas for designing or exploring a simulation. In collaboration over a network, several students work together on a simulated world even though they are sitting at different computers, perhaps separated by thousands of miles. But MUDs go beyond traditional adventure games in two important dimensions.