Report on the CELDA 2005 Conference
The end of the year approaches and the conferences keep coming. The last trip of the year was the second IADIS Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2005).
This has been a remarkable experience because it was the first public presentation of the <e-game> project. Our paper (The <e-game> project: Facilitating the development of educational adventure games) was presented in front of a small but very receptive audience. After the presentation and during the rest of the conference I gathered a lot positive feedback and a couple of petitions of a demo. The current prototypes are not yet as complete and furnished to become an actual demo, but this means I should REALLY get on with the <e-game> section of the website for once and for all. The stub has been there for far too long.
However, the nicest surprise was how many people actually felt positive about educational gaming beyond the typical confrontation against the stereotypes. The work of some them is relevant to this blog.
Dr. Tom Page from the Loughborough University was presenting the paper “Emotionality considerations in virtual reality and simulation based learning”, co-authored by Miika Lehtonen (University of Lapland) and Gisli Thorsteinsson (Iceland University of Education). It was a reflection of the role played by emotions when it comes to immersion and motivation inside virtual environments. Although this is far from my domain of expertise, I found it fascinating because it is the scientific basis that supports the claim that videogames are a motivational medium.
Dr. Alex Amato from the University of Hong Kong commented how they have been using the Sim City series to teach about sustainability in the field of architecture (I love that idea) and had very interesting opinions on how to enhance learning processes in general.
Sébastien George from the National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon presented an interesting poster titled “Simulating learners in educational games” co-authored by Désirée Titon. It presented their advances in creating artificial players that can explore all the possible interactions of a learner inside an educational game. This is very interesting when it comes to guaranteeing that all the content is navigated, that there are no loopholes and similar things.
Finally, the work of André Melzer (and his team from the Univeristy of Lübeck) entitled “Developing, Implementing and testing mixed reality and high interaction media applications in schools” was not strictly about game-based learning, but it was all about bringing fun into the educational processes and thus it is relevant for the blog too.
By the way, Porto is a beautiful city and I will publish some photos in the album very soon (or very late).
