Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

It’s been ages since I last posted something. Time constraints this year are being worse than ever and I hardly find the time to write (interesting) things. Just to remind everyone (including me) that I still maintain this blog, I wanted to give a brief overview of the current state of the <e-Adventure> family of platforms.

Yes, I said family.

I am assuming that readers of this blog are already familiar with the <e-Adventure> platform. Almost one year ago, I introduced in this blog the <e-Adventure3D> platform, a 3D version of the same approach to educational gaming. During the last year, we have also been working on a mobile version designed to work in mobile phones, with the idea that it would be possible to create a 2D adventure game using the <e-Adventure> editor and then “export” it suiting different mobile devices.

We have been busy in the last few months promoting this family of platforms all around the world. First, I presented a very early prototype of the mobile platform (<m-Adventure>) at the DIGITEL 2008 conference in Banff, Canada (and I wrote about it).

Then, I went to Japan to present for the first time our <e-Adventure3D> platform in an academic event, the ACM Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE 2008). The presentation was very successful, mostly because the platform is really cool. I really hope we can push this development further. This is the full citation (remember that you can always find all our publications at the <e-UCM> website):

Javier Torrente, Guillermo Cañizal, Ángel del Blanco, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008): < e-Adventure3D>: An Open Source Authoring Environment for 3D Adventure Games in Education. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2008). December 2008, Yokohama, Japan.

Only a few weeks ago, Pablo Lavín went to Jordan to present a newer, much improved version of <m-Adventure>, where he spoke about our flexible architecture designed to support multiple exportation profiles at the IMCL 2009 conference. This is the citation:

Pablo Lavín-Mera, Javier Torrente, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2009): Mobile Game Development for Multiple Devices in Education. In proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Mobile and Computer-Aided Learning (IMCL 2009), Amman, Jordan.

At the core of all these products, is the notion of using a Learning Management System as a central point in game-based learning activities. Javier Torrente recently traveled to Liverpool to present our work in how to coordinate heterogeneous game platforms (including <e-Adventure>) using a Learning Management System as a persistence layer. The presentation was very succesful and received the Best Paper Award from the Programme Committee at the GDTW 2008 conference. This is the full citation:

Javier Torrente, Pablo Lavín-Mera, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008).  Coordinating Heterogeneous Game-based Learning Approaches in Online Learning Environments. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Game Design and Technology Workshop and Conference (GDTW2008), pages 27-36. Liverpool, UK.

As you may see, in spite of the long silences in this blog, our research line is more active than ever. We are being pleasantly successful with our products and really anxious to see how far we can go. And soon you will all get a glimpse of our recent progress. Stay tuned for the inminent release of <e-Adventure> 1.0, which right now looks awesome.

<e-Adventure> articles, conferences, travelling

I am currently involved in a development project where we are trying to mimic the scheme of Brain Training for the Nintendo DS (released as DS Training in Japan and Brain Age in the US), with exercises focused on the different subjects from Computer Science studies.

It was thus very interesting to read this article about the game being “no better than paper and pencil”. The valorations presented in the article are so dramatically off-target that I couldn’t resist ranting about them.

The article starts from the notion that “Brain Training no better than paper and pencil” and then constructs an attack against the game as mostly a great scam. You only need to read the first paragraph:

“A 10p pencil is just as good as a £100 Nintendo at stimulating the memory, according to a study that dismisses the DS Lite’s claims to boost the brain”.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Bad news? A scam? Demonstrating that the game is as good as traditional pen and paper exercises is awesome news! Really, have you ever known a child that arrives home and grabs a piece of paper to do math calculations? The brilliant design of this game is having turned some of the most boring tasks ever into a compelling game, tapping into our competitive nature to turn boredom into excitement. The only risk was that, in the process, we could have spoiled the cognitive value of the tasks. Dr. Lieury has not killed our research into the usefulness of game-based learning. He has validated it, and I’m thankful.

It is also interesting how, according to the article, Dr. Lieury goes on to state: “There were few positive effects and they were weak. Dr Kawashima is one of a long list of dream merchants.” After reading that, I could no longer trust anything in this research. Prof. Kawashima is a renowned neuroscientist, doing state-of-the-art research on brain imaging. In an attempt to be moderate, I will simply say that calling him “dream merchant”  is a disinformed statement. Being aggressive I would use other words.

General educational games, game design, media

I forgot to mention that last month we released a new version of the <e-Adventure> platform. This is, honestly, our biggest release yet. In a previous post I spoke about the mid-term plans for the platform, with releases 0.8, 0.9 and 1.0 (or 0.10?) in the near future.

Well, 0.9 is available and it is mostly feature-complete. The next iteration focuses mostly on usability (many UI changes) and tweaks. So, it is more important than ever to receive constructive feedback and suggestions, so that we can push them into our 1.0 milestone.

Please go ahead, download it, make your game and then let us know what you think. Thank you.

<e-Adventure> projects

About two years, while I stayed in Maastricht working at the OUNL ago we started collaborating with Drs. Marc Spaniol and Ralf Klamma from RWTH Aachen. They were doing projects related to interactive storytelling and we were half-way through the first implementation of <e-Adventure>. Since then, our main line of collaboration was the integration of our tools to explore new methodologies to create learning games, as described in this post from the STEG08 Workshop.

One of the most appealing “artifacts” of this initiative was an educational created by our German partners to help Afghan locals understand the procedures involved in archeological work at the Bamiyan Valley Cultural Heritage site. Niels Drobek was one of the main developers for that educational game, which stands as one of the earliests applications of the <e-Adventure> platform in a real setting.

He has put together a video about the game, and it was great to see what they accomplished with such an early version of the platform (it even has the unicorn cursor!). Thank you Niels for your great work.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects, travelling

2009 has started strongly for us, at least in terms of mediatic impact. We started the year with a radio interview with our colleagues from UNED, which was aired on national radio very early in the morning of January 7th 2009. We spoke about the benefits of games in education and outlined our main ideas about how to use games properly in education.

Download radio interview (in Spanish)

More or less at the same time, we were contacted by the Science News Service from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation. They had seen our paper about Educational Game Design in the Journal Computers in Human Behavior and wanted to prepare a short piece about games in education. A bit later, they decided that they wanted to complement it with a short video interview.

Video Interview (in Spanish)

News piece about e-Adventure (in Spanish)

Translated version (in English)

I guess that this amount of media attention means that these ideas are catching on. This cannot translate into a feeling of “we did it!”. The current and short-term research is critical for the success of educational games. As Dr. Van Eck put it, now everyone is paying attention to educational gaming. We must live up to those expectations now or fail forever.

Research e-learning, game design, media

When the semester started I reflected on how I could introduce games into my regular university courses. Now that the semester is almost over, it is a good time to look back and check on my progress.

Laboratorio de Programación de Sistemas (LPS)

LPS is a 3rd year laboratory on programming. The students are implementing in Java an advanced version of the traditional Battleship board game. It is an incremental exercise, starting with very simple console interfaces and then increasing the complexity to include new rules and interfaces.

As of today, the sudents have already delivered the first two iterations, now including a GUI and special shooting options.  The exercises are designed with enough flexibility so as to allow the students to go for the bare minimum required to pass or to improve their implementations.

The results have been varied, as it is natural in a class with 140 students. While some students have been struggling with creating an event-driven game and others have settled for the bare minimum, there have been a few groups that have delivered some very interesting exercises. One group has implemented a very advanced an interesting GUI for the game, including life-bars for the different ships, target-grid cursors and some other effects. I was very glad to see this because they are aware that, given the restrictions of the course, this will not translate into a better mark. This means that, within the culture of the minimum effort to pass, some students are enjoying a practical exercise which is more appealing that the typical enterprise-based exercises.

It is not game-based learning, but at least we get to play a bit during the evaluation sessions

Introducción a la Programación (IP)

IP is a first year course on Programming Fundamentals. Here it is somewhat more complicated to introduce games, but I still wanted to do something. The last day before the exams break I prepared a game session with the help of my colleague José Ramón Pérez Agüera (actually, he did most of the work). The concept was simple: we prepared around 80 quiz questions about the contents of the first semester and put them into an opensource Trivial game.

In class I separated the students in four groups and we played for a bit more than an hour. When a group failed to answer a question, I explained the solution in the board for the class (and did the same thing if anyone asked why a specific answer was correct).

From an educational point of view it was a positive experience: It served all of us to gauge the current level of knowledge before the exam, it was a chance to revisit in class some nuances of data types and procedure invocation and it also helped the students see some prototipical quiz questions in the subject.

From a motivation point of view it also seemed positive (although not flawless). Out of 15 students in class, I perceived that at least two of them didn’t really engage in the activity. However, most of them apparently liked the experience and soon the competitive aspects of the game engaged them. While the class was scheduled to finish at 18:50, it was already 19:00 when they decided they wanted a final round to break the tie between the two leading teams.

The class ended almost 20 minutes late. Considering that mine was the last session in a Friday evening, I am quite happy with the results.

Regarding the tipical factor of time-constraints, neither approach required an excessive increase in my workload. While these activities are not revolutionary steps, I am glad to be see a positive response by the students so far. Let’s see what happens in the second semester.

Personal, Research educational games, teaching

Hey! Notice anything different?

I eventually got tired of the old look of the blog and made some changes to the general appearance. Feel free to let me know what you think about the new look

General blogging

2008 has been a very interesting year for me. In 2007 I got my PhD degree and 2008 was an unkown. Would my life be empty after the PhD? Would I get a shot at a position in my University? Would I be able to continue working on <e-Adventure>? Would new research projects open before me? Or maybe I would simply become complacent and let a futile year go by?

Well, these are some of the highlights from the year:

• We accelerated a lot in the development of the <e-Adventure> platform, thanks at first to the involvement of Javier Torrente, and then with the support of the FLEXO project
• We have imparted three courses about the use of <e-Adventure> for teachers, educational technologists and professional content developers.
• We did some field tests with <e-Adventure> games, creating a game for medicine students and testing it with 65 students (still working on the results…)
• I signed a four year teaching contract with my department and started teaching full-time at my university
• We started a new line of research on using mobile game consoles (Nintendo DS in particular) to develop educational games
• We completed the first development of the <e-Adventure3D> platform, as described in this post
• We started working on a mobile version of the <e-Adventure> platform
• I participated in 14 research publications (including journals, conferences and workshops), with two conference papers receiving the Best Paper Award (ICWL 2008 and GDTW 2008)
• I attended four conferences (ICALT 2008, STEG 2008, DIGITEL 2008 and ACE 2008)

Not too complacent, huh? The bad part is that now I’m not sure if I will manage to pull another year like this one… I’ll tell you next year!

General conferences, projects, teaching

By the end of November, I attended the DIGITEL 2008 conference in Banff, Canada. This is the IEEE conference on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning and, as such, there were a lot of interesting papers about game-based learning. The papers are already available at IEEE Xplore.

Our paper, also available as a draft at the <e-UCM> website, described our first steps towards the implementation of a mobile version of the <e-Adventure> platform:

Pablo Lavín-Mera, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón: Development of educational videogames in m-Learning contexts. Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning (DIGITEL 2008), pp. 44-51. Banff, Canada. (IEEE Computer Society). 2008

This article is part of Pablo Lavín’s Master Thesis, a project that I’m proud to be directing.

During the conference I met a lot of great fellows, including a group of European grad students that are researching in game-based learning:

From left to right, they are Hanno Hildmann (German, but residing in the UK), Sheryl Wu (from Taiwan, neither grad student nor european, but great anyway), Neil Peirce (from Ireland) and Rikki Prince (from the UK). And yes, it was very very cold.

Travelling to Banff was difficult and expensive, but the location was really awesome. Apart from the work bits, we went all the way up to the mountains with the Banff Gondola, did some hiking in the forest, spotted wild animals and threw rocks into a couple of iced ponds. I would say we had a lot of fun. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

Research articles, conferences, educational games, travelling

Every research project comes to a stage in which the research is finished, and you have a working prototype that proves your ideas. This stage is one of the most critical points in the life-cycle. Once you reach there, the project is not that interesting from a research perspective, which means it is more difficult to find funding to keep working on it so that it becomes a production-ready tool.

<e-Adventure>, as a prototype for my PhD. work, entered that stage a few months ago. However, thanks to the FLEXO project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, the future of the platform is brighter than ever. The project is about the development of adaptive learning platforms, and one of the work packages deals with adaptive gaming. <e-Adventure> will be the core of that work package.

We have thus hired three new programmers to work on the platform, which means an important increase of our work capacity. For the duration of the FLEXO project, we will try to push the platform as far as possible, including a complete redesign of the adaptation module (of course), lots of new features and a lot of usability improvements.

Stay tuned for the next few releases driving towards our 1.0 milestone (0.8 before Christmas, 0.9 in February and 1.0 in Spring).

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects