15 Most Important Generic Questions to ask Subject Matter Experts when designing an Educational Simulation

Interviewing subject matter experts for educational simulations can be tricky. Here are the top fifteen generic questions:

1. What situation that you experienced epitomized the subject matter? (This could be a real time meeting, or an event that took place over weeks, months, or years.) Were there multiple situations?
2. What were your available options? At each moment, what could you have done in that situation, and what might a naive or inexperienced person done? What did you end up doing?
3. Why would the naive approach fail? What would it not have taken into account?
4. What were clues that you saw that informed your knowledge of the situation? What did you see immediately, and what information for which you had to look? How did you look?
5. What did you want success to be? What did the conclusion end up being?
6. What were you looking for to suggest that things were going well? What were you looking for to suggest that things were not going well?
7. What were the "maintenance" or routine activities that you had to do (even including body language)? What would happen if you did not do them?
8. What was the moment were you knew you were successful? (or not.)
9. What was each person's best case and worse case outcome? What were their strategies and actions?
10. What would have been three to five legitimate alternative approaches to the problem or situation?
11. What were the three to five high level metrics that you were monitoring? Time? Commitment? Alignment?
12. What trade-offs were you willing to make? What trade-offs did you make?
13. Can you graph the high level metrics over the course of the experience?
14. What were the inflection points for each?
15. How do the actions impact the high level metrics? What else impacts the high level metrics (be as specific as possible)?