By Tristia Hennessey, Lead Instructional Designer
DevLearn 2022 was the same wonderful whirlwind, drinking-from-the-firehose event we’ve come to expect from this annual Las Vegas event. Evolve Solutions Group covered a lot of ground this year:
Alex Ryan spoke on 3 occasions, twice at the Articulate User Conference: once with me and once with James Oakley; as well as at DevLearn, sharing insights from some of our past projects like Taco Builder and Burger Builder.
James and I met another co-host of the XRinLXD Community, Leslie Early, at SandboxVR to give group VR a try. We’re recapping that and more at the next XRinLXD meetup on November 30th. Spoiler alert, it was amazing! Definitely some technical kinks to work out, but a great way to experience VR with friends. Speaking of VR, I attended Day 2 of the VR for Learning Summit, which included some great sessions and fun VR storyboarding practice.
The Evolve Team and many others from DevLearn went to Meow Wolf’s interactive art exhibit Omega Mart, which was part satirical social commentary on our commoditized consumerism, part psychedelic, futuristic and immersive light show, and part mystery, with clues scattered throughout the experience in newspaper clippings, hidden rooms, flashy exhibits, and computer consoles logged with videos and email copies.
We also presented not one but two projects at DemoFest on Thursday: one for Sonic’s Burger Builder, and one for SoCalGas’ High Energy Hazard Awareness training. Neither project won, but we were grateful for the opportunity to go up against some stiff competition this year with over 50 DemoFest participants. While we didn’t win DemoFest, we found out on the last day of DemoFest that we won a Davey Award for Sonic’s Burger Builder project, so we still had plenty to celebrate!
As usual, there were more sessions to visit than humanly possible, but among some of the rockstar sessions we attended were speakers Cath Ellis, Tim Slade, Samuel Apata, Ashley Chiasson, Kristin Torrence, Taylor Tomanio (who also won the shirt design this year!), Nick Floro, and Kevin Thorne.
Each year the expo hall gets livelier and more creative as exhibitors and sponsors are including more fun, more practical, or more eco-friendly swag or activities to entice visitors to booths. One vendor even had puppies at their booth for free snuggles! There was a lot of traffic at the Expo this year, and we met a ton of great folks. If you wanted to connect at the conference but missed us, please get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.
A big, big thank you to the Learning Guild and Articulate, and to all the organizers and coordinators that helped make DevLearn 2022 a smashing success. We can’t wait to see you in 2023!