HIGH QUALITY/LOW COST

Challenge: Maintenance

Simulations were constructed with a “lock box” mentality. Once you finished the content, it was packed up and locked into some programming language. If you wanted to make edits, you needed a programmer. And then you had to go through the process of putting the black box together again and double-checking it to make sure that the changes were replicated in the end product. The content was also arranged in such a way that there was no hierarchy of information. In other words, if you wanted to change one principle or idea that occurred in a lot of different places, you had to painstakingly go through perhaps hundreds of pages and find all the instances where that idea occurred and change each. More often than not, you missed a few.

EB’s solution: EB addressed this issue by separating the content (what the user sees, hears, and does) from the code (how the user sees, hears, and does it). Hence, authors can change the content as much as they’d like, without having to touch the code. Since the tool allows instances of content to be re-used throughout a simulation, authors can make changes in one or more places and have those changes automatically propagated in appropriate places. EB hosts the development system on its server, so prototypes can be created and viewed at the touch of a button. Moreover, rather than embed the simulation architecture in a “black-box” environment such as Flash or Java, EB’s proprietary architecture makes use of HTML “templates” that your staff can freely manipulate to add or refine the operation of the system. This makes EB simulations completely “open source.”