Advantages:
Experts in education (and not only) admit to the positive effects of simulation in training,
guidance, and counselling, which justifies the expansion of the method as ”learning and
simulating games” software.
Through its complexity, the simulation reunites the advantages of classical information
methods and those of discovery and communication, and especially game and drama
play, that is:
- offers concentrated global information for problem solving;
- it is a stimulating and motivating method because it satisfies the immediate
and foreseeable needs of the beneficiary starting from a very concrete level
up to highly abstract formalizations; - activates the participants involved in real roles that they internalise;
- “presents the advantage of active participation of the entire group, contributes
to the lifelong training of educational actors” (V ăideanu, 1979); - anticipates vocational success by practicing the occupational role;
- develops communication, inter-relating, emotion and feeling control skills;
- requires presence of mind and initiative in critical situations, socializes by
developing the team spirit; - models thinking, develops the creative imagination and decision-making
capacity; - creates patterns to explore, investigate, and even hypotheses experimentation;
- develops management capacities and provisional strategies, practices
negotiation and conflict solving skills; - requires discipline, conformity to previously decided upon plans and
scenarios.
Disadvantages:
- simulation being a complex method, the time for preparing the scenario and
carrying it out the simulation is very long; - requires particular effort on the part of beneficiaries, and previous experience
/ training on the part of the counsellor; - emotional involvement, and stress or fear of failure in case of vulnerable
clients; - through its catharsis effect it can generate unexpected emotional outburst,
which calls for immediate therapeutic intervention; - some simulation software leads to addiction, especially in puberty or
adolescence.