Clark Aldrich

Clark Aldrich is an American author and practitioner who has pioneered and expanded the use of educational simulations and serious games for education and professional skills.

He has been the lead designer for several ground-breaking educational simulations, including SimuLearn's Virtual Leader, which won best online training product of the year in 2004 by Training Media Review and the American Society of Training and Development's T+D Magazine - the first game-like product to win. He currently creates about three new simulations a year for corporate, academic, and non-profit organizations.

His published research, beginning in 1999, outlined the failure of formal education approaches to teach leadership, innovation, and other strategic skills, and then advocated interactive experiences borrowing techniques from current computer games as media to fill these gaps. He argues that computer games represent new, "post-linear" models for capturing and representing content, but that new computer game genres will have to be created, optimized for learning as well as entertainment. His research and simulation design work, which he conducted outside of the influence and prescription of academic and grant-giving institutions, resulted in a series of articles, speeches, and 5 books.

Aldrich's fifth book was Unschooling Rules in 2011. The premise of this book was that current education models have been sub optimized around a series of assumptions (classrooms, books, broad curricula, transcripts) that will repel significant improvement while in place. He advocates that education researchers and change agents look to home schoolers and unschoolers as environments of and for innovation.