Kilted-Klingon's Leadership Lab Events
Greetings all -
I thought to start a separate thread to document our leadership lab / teambuilding events.
Some quick background. I organize these events for a Scout Troop on the US East Coast. Our goal is to use the starship bridge sim software as the mechanism through which to teach leadership skills and overall good teamwork in a fun and engaging way. This will be our third year running the event.
In addition to running the bridge sims and everyone having a great time, one key element of our events is that each bridge crew has an assigned "Mentor/Evaluator". This person typically has some military/leadership experience, and their role is to mentor the team by providing feedback after each event. The M/E leads the group in an After Action Review to discuss how the scenario went, how effectively the crew met their objectives, what could they have done better, etc. We think the M/E role and AAR activities are essential to the overall experience. It's gaming with a purpose.
Because we also run the events as competitions, the M/E's are also responsible for scoring the teams. We have evaluation sheets that are mostly the same, but have some tailoring to the specific scenario being run. We give prizes to the best performing teams.
So you have an idea how our physical area is set up, here's a simplified floorplan drawing of the activity center that hosts our events. It's not exact, but close enough for this purpose.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qnBCkCAvZYDQUopbNKh5Bx2PUcBmblpL/view?usp=sharing
As you can see from the floorplan, we have the physical space to set up 6 complete bridges (and more on other floors if we have the participants/computers). We put a ship in the large open area to make it easy for parents/visitors to see a bridge crew in action, and we encourage everyone to sit in and play a bit. Having one ship in the large gathering room makes this easy. Keeping the GameMaster's command center in a separate room keeps the traffic down and that area under control. Of course, isolating the bridge crews from each other keeps them from overhearing each other and forces them to use the ship comms, whether they are playing cooperative or competitive scenarios.
Each ship is outfitted with 6 Dell laptops (of various flavors) and most rooms have a large screen monitor to serve as the forward view screen. I use a mid-tower Dell or a beefed up laptop as our simulation server.
This is our typical "flow" for each scenario:
Also, in order to run the events, I usually have a tech crew of 3 or 4 who are dedicated to going between the rooms to fix the inevitable problems that pop up and they keep everything running smoothly. We use hand-held radios to communicate. (All M/Es also have radios to ask for assistance as needed when issues pop up. Mr. Murphy is a constant attendee at our events… ha)
I thought to start a separate thread to document our leadership lab / teambuilding events.
Some quick background. I organize these events for a Scout Troop on the US East Coast. Our goal is to use the starship bridge sim software as the mechanism through which to teach leadership skills and overall good teamwork in a fun and engaging way. This will be our third year running the event.
In addition to running the bridge sims and everyone having a great time, one key element of our events is that each bridge crew has an assigned "Mentor/Evaluator". This person typically has some military/leadership experience, and their role is to mentor the team by providing feedback after each event. The M/E leads the group in an After Action Review to discuss how the scenario went, how effectively the crew met their objectives, what could they have done better, etc. We think the M/E role and AAR activities are essential to the overall experience. It's gaming with a purpose.
Because we also run the events as competitions, the M/E's are also responsible for scoring the teams. We have evaluation sheets that are mostly the same, but have some tailoring to the specific scenario being run. We give prizes to the best performing teams.
So you have an idea how our physical area is set up, here's a simplified floorplan drawing of the activity center that hosts our events. It's not exact, but close enough for this purpose.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qnBCkCAvZYDQUopbNKh5Bx2PUcBmblpL/view?usp=sharing
As you can see from the floorplan, we have the physical space to set up 6 complete bridges (and more on other floors if we have the participants/computers). We put a ship in the large open area to make it easy for parents/visitors to see a bridge crew in action, and we encourage everyone to sit in and play a bit. Having one ship in the large gathering room makes this easy. Keeping the GameMaster's command center in a separate room keeps the traffic down and that area under control. Of course, isolating the bridge crews from each other keeps them from overhearing each other and forces them to use the ship comms, whether they are playing cooperative or competitive scenarios.
Each ship is outfitted with 6 Dell laptops (of various flavors) and most rooms have a large screen monitor to serve as the forward view screen. I use a mid-tower Dell or a beefed up laptop as our simulation server.
This is our typical "flow" for each scenario:
- Ship Captains and their M/Es gather for an in-briefing
- GameMaster explains the scenario objectives and answers any questions related to the instructions
- Ship Captains and M/Es gather with their crews in their ship rooms, and the Captains explain the scenario objectives and provide their orders
- GameMaster orchestrates the scenario; Captains run their ships to accomplish the objectives; M/E's observe and take notes on crew performance
- Scenarios can last between 45-90 mins, depending
- At the conclusion of the scenario, the M/E leads their crew through an AAR discussion; we provide 15-20 mins for this discussion
- Short break, and get ready for the next scenario
- At the end of the event (and sometimes in the middle), we have an all-group discussion to walk through various points/issues/topics that are relevant to their scenarios and performance.
Also, in order to run the events, I usually have a tech crew of 3 or 4 who are dedicated to going between the rooms to fix the inevitable problems that pop up and they keep everything running smoothly. We use hand-held radios to communicate. (All M/Es also have radios to ask for assistance as needed when issues pop up. Mr. Murphy is a constant attendee at our events… ha)
Comments
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tyalDlpmg4iUl6X7XYBRAeMcgcP5yNwl/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11rVnFiNmNhJsNIBXSXeQBwC7PrGTwAGY/view?usp=sharing
Main Event 003, 23 Feb 2019:
Software: Empty Epsilon, Custom Mod of base release version 2019-01-19
I know the handheld radios are meant to be a back-up solution by now, but have they jacks for an external mic? I guess only holding the mic in the hand would fit more to the setting than holding the whole radio. (Having stationary radios would be even cooler, but even though there are pretty cheap ones, I guess that might be too expensive if you have to get 6+ of them)
I am with a Planetarium crew that works on this game. I am wondering what you did to the original game, or what current game modes you used for the games you play. Is there a place where we could download a version to see?
Regards,
Tony
https://github.com/daid/EmptyEpsilon/pull/634
Were you referring to the base game or the scenario scripts, or perhaps both? For Main Event 003, we were using a custom mod of the daid's version 2019.01.19. It's only a slight mod however as described above. Daid has accepted the mod changes into the repository trunk and I assume they will be included in the next release.
For scripts, Xansta and I have been collaborating on the scripts for these events. He's been an invaluable partner! The link for the CtF script is above. I'm not quite ready to share the other scripts just yet - Xansta and I have a new approach that we'd like to employ to organize our scripts to support both individual and multiple ship crews in a cleaner approach. I'd like us to get these scripts rebuilt with the new approach before releasing them into the wild.
I'm curious, how do you run EE in a planetarium? What does your set-up look like? Single or multiple ship crews? Have a blog or pics to share?
Main Event 004, 5 Apr 2019:
drive.google.com/open?id=1cNb3P75cPr1KgQGUFfdr2hvcbtFMfICn
drive.google.com/open?id=1Caee3dTuTDnxNVObIDYS7C8WHRLVAk3k
drive.google.com/open?id=1XYNkreDFOW_l9Ma1cpebu6ODmwlMpXB2
However, real thanks go to you daid for having built the EE platform and allowed us all to participate. Without your work, none of this would have been possible.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. 8-)
Main Event 005, 26 June 2019:
Main Event 006, 24 Aug 2019:
Ref CtF v 0.16.7, yes, we'll be happy to share. Pls let Xansta and I confer first, and then we'll be glad to share with you. Pls give us a couple of days. Got a lot on the plate.
Also, seeing you play trough the internet as well, and the server location is a bit of an issue there. Would it help if there is an option to connect the server to some remote "relay" server that only serves to break trough NAT/firewalls?
I investigated if NAT hole punching would be an option for EE2, but that is so fragile that I don't even have access to networks in which this works. So I'm thinking about a small simple relay server. Both the client and server connect to the relay, and the relay only passes on the data. Not ideal for ping times, but makes it a lot easier to setup internet games without port forwarding/DMZs. As outgoing connections are generally not an issue.
Yea, we were going to try to include internet participants in this last event, but then chose not to. The event was entirely LAN participants with the server on the LAN.
Ref crashing issue. At first I thought it was most probably logic/table/object management errors in our CtF script, but I made a simple test script that only spawns CPU ships and has no other logic included, and the crash still occurs.
To make it easier to convey the issue, I put together a video demonstrating the crashes under various conditions from the test script. I've posted the video here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GMdAoqLozLoL9QIDf5ZINXQZiacUdl0E
The test script used in the video is here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hWAO82xTuVbXT1RYBhHMNShrnYNfRXGp
As stated in the video, the awesome solution would be to have the CPU-v-CPU fights remain stable under reasonable loads; if not that, then understanding the conditions that cause the issue so we can avoid them.
My guess is that you'll probably want to move this discussion to GitHub as an issue? I'm glad to follow, but have to confess that I haven't made an issue in GH before, and certainly don't mind learning/doing, just being transparent that it's still relatively new to me.
Many, many thanks for having taken an interest in checking this out. Completely respect your time and cycle constraints. I will say though that having this issue made more stable will have a HUGE impact on our leadership labs.... 8-)
https://github.com/daid/EmptyEpsilon/commit/b81530519777129f39d1d2015699c201d3e54276
Happens when a ship is firing a laser and is destroyed in the same game tick. More likely to happen the more ships you have.
Main Event 007, 14 Nov 2019:
Main Event 008, 6 Dec 2019: