Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

Last Monday I found myself surprisingly walking the streets of Maastricht after having lived there for almost 2 months. I went there to attend the First Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Gaming (STEG08), a part of the 2008 European Conference on Web-based Learning (ECTEL 2008).

There, I presented a joint work with researchers from Complutense University, the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and RWTH Aachen, combining the MIST platform and the <e-Adventure> platform to create story-driven educational games. The idea is to use MIST to create interactive stories and then export these stories as <e-Adventure> game skeletons. The skeletons can then be refined (fleshed?) using the <e-Adventure> editor. The result is a two-step process that enables the creation of good educational games with solid stories, or more attractive interactive stories with game elements. This is our second report on this work, focusing on metadata interoperbility.

If you are interested in knowing some more about this project, you can check this reference on the <e-UCM> website:

Marc Spaniol, Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, José Luis Sierra, Georgios Toubekis: From Story-Telling to Educational Gaming: The Bamiyan Valley Case. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2008), Jinhua, China. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5145, pp. 253-264. 2008

Following this line of collaboration with our German friends, Yiwei Cao presented the brand new version of the MIST project, called PESE. It mostly focuses on increasing the collaborative nature of the original project.

There were also a couple of presentations from the 80 Days project. I was surprised by how their discourse resembles ours. In fact, I could have used several of their slides in my thesis presentation as the introduction and identification of objectives.

Unfortunately, they have the support of the VII Framework Program and we don’t (for non-Europeans or non-researchers: the FP is the way in which the EU injects huge amounts of money into research projects). In any case, it makes me very glad to see that there is someone with the will and the resources to put all these ideas into practice. I actually see it as a legitimation of our work.

Some other contributions dealt with the impact of online gaming in career development (in short, the idea that participating in complex online communities is a good training for soft-skills that can be applied in career development), with the importance of some narrative ideas in our society (most of all, the Hero’s Journey), or with the development of interesting mashups using google maps to teach Ancient Greek Myths.

If you want to know more, the online procedures from the Workshop can be found here:
http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-386/

Randy Pausch is a key academic figure in the fields of Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality and Serious Gaming.

As a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he created the amazing Building Virtual Worlds course, a reference in the field. He co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at CMU, which is also a reference as far as serious games are related (not as much in the “games-can-teach flavour” but in the “games-are-art flavour”).

But the first time I came to hear his name was actually as the mind behind Alice, a tool that facilitates the creation of 3D animations and environments, lowering the access barriers to learning java programming, object orientation and 3D programming.

On Tuesday, Prof. Pausch delivered an amazing lecture at CMU, in a cycle that used to be called “Last Lectures” (now, Journeys) in which CMU asks their star professors to give the lectures they would like to be remembered for. It was an amazing lecture about life, the relations with others, and an overview of an entire lifetime.

It also drags a huge emotional background due to Pausch’s fatal medical condition. However, just as he does during the lecture, I only wanted to mention that point but not make it central to the discussion. The lecture is amazing by itself and I really recommend investing two hours of your life in listening to the story of his life.

Lecture in streaming video

Note that the lecture itself does not address any academic issues. For that reason, I was doubting whether to post it here. But this morning I realized that listening to this lecture has been the most important thing that has happened to me during the entire week. From that perspective, I actually couldn’t post about anything else.

Due to the requests of some groups, the deadline for the submission of contributions for the EGAEL Workshops at ICALT 2007 and ISAGA 2007 has been extended to March 7th.

If you already submitted your work, the submission system will allow you to post an updated version if you wish.

The EGAEL Initiative announces their 2007 project focused on the discussion and promotion of adaptive learning using videogames and simulations.

During the year, we will be organizing two International Workshops on Electronic Games and Personalized eLearning Processes at the ICALT 2007 and ISAGA 2007 conferences.

Additionally, we will be editing two special issues for international journals. The first special issue will focus on practical aspects and will be published by the Simulation & Gaming online journal under the title Special Issue on eGames and Adaptive eLearning: A practical approach. The other publication will focus on theoretical backgrounds and methodologies and will be published by the Computers in Human Behavior journal under the title Special issue on Electronic Games and Personalized eLearning Processes.

Interested? Just check the the EGAEL website and submit your contributions.

Well, there goes my half-promise of updating every other week after September. If this research blog is “my creature”, it follows that, in all the world, I’m the person who cares more about it and I keep failing to pay it proper attention. So, what will the rest of the world think? Easy guess. Fortunately readers may have such a thing as RSS aggregators that allow them to ignore this blog until something interesting happens in it and their aggregator tells them. Easy excuse.

Moving on, let’s talk game-based learning. My latest chore was a visit to the ICEC 2006 Conference in Cambridge, UK. I spoke about <e-Game> there with an audience that knew what a game was, that accepted that games and education match (weeee!) and where noone raised a hand when I asked who did not know Monkey Island (well, actually one person did, but he didn’t understand the question properly). In retrospection, maybe it was because I asked the question in negative, and that means I counted in all the attendants that were actually asleep as positive votes. To keep my morale up, from now on I will always ask these questions in negative.

The approach was reasonably well received, maybe slightly technical for part of the audience, but I perceived interest. Andrè Melzer (second appearance in this blog!) seemed interested and we discussed about the possibility of turning that personal interest into an institutional interest from the Univeristy of Lübeck.

Speaking of the University of Lübeck, it’s curious how its Institute for Multimedia and Interactive Systems keeps doing stuff that is almost games, without really being games. With the incredibly original ideas they have (on this conference Andrè Melzer spoke about interactive radio plays and Wendy Ann Mansilla spoke about using Acousmêtre in virtual environments), they could enter the game-based learning arena as a storm and really come up with original ideas.

Obviously in a conference about entertainment computing it is difficult to extract only a few papers for a decent-sized blog entry without leaving out a lot of interesting works. Let’s just point out some adjectives:

The curious: Wim van Eck presenting a paper describing their experiences in designing games with real animals within. On the premise that animals are unpredictable and non-deterministic, they conducted a pilot in which they created a pac-man game connected to a camera that looks at some crickets hanging around and translates their real movement to the ghosts in the computer game. Do check it out, it is really interesting.

The true game-based learning: Colleague Pedro Gonzalez Calero presenting the evolution of JV²M, a true game specifically designed to learn the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machine (for a Theory of Compilers subject). Developed by the people sitting next to me in my office, by the way. It will be easy to keep an eye on that project

The game-related: The most game-related talks were actually the keynotes. Emotions in game design, casual games and hardcore gaming rankings and matching. Hard to decide which was more pure gaming. Let’s give Microsoft this one.

The trend: Lot’s works coming from Asia related to hand motion recognition. In all flavours: Using an active glove, using a glove with beacons, recognizing the movement of the bare hand, you name it. Those were different works by different groups in different countries. See a trend? If you are looking for a new line of research, consider that one.

Other notes: Dutch people innovating in Dance Dance Revolution and similars, a lot of interactive storyelling, several GPS-based games (I should really explore that area) and lots of reflections in the relations between games and emotions.

In any case, this is a shallow selection. There were a lot of great talks, so check the conference’s website (they promised to eventually post the presentations there… still waiting) and the proceedings. You won’t regret it.

As for the conference organization: Superb. Nice location, nice facilities, and a nice information flow. Buses to pick us up in the center of the city (and drop us there), two dinners, lunch included. A weird”gala” dinner including live music by a rock band, which is a very interesting twist from traditional conferences. Kudos to them.

The research facilities that Microsoft has in Cambridge look like a wonderful place to produce good science. They even had a XBOX-360 in the common area, which connects with the ranting bit of this post: If this was a Entertainment Computing conference, how comes I didn’t see anyone approach it during the entire conference other than myself and my colleague Pedro González Calero? We can’t talk about entertainment if we never have fun, we can’t talk about games if we don’t like games.

Next post from the Netherlands, I’m visiting the Educational Technology Expertise Center at the Open University of the Netherlands with Daniel Burgos as host researcher, where we will explore the integration of games authored with <e-Game> and Units of Learning following IMS Learning Design.

The Games Learning and Society Conference took place a few months ago and I was very disappointed for not being able to attend. However, a few days ago an interesting fact was brought to my attention: Some selected moments of the conference were filmed and are now available online.

They use an interesting format combining streaming video with synchronized slides (ok, I have seen more impressive technologies, but they were always very expensive, subscription based and never covering an academic conference).

While we all wait for the next edition of the conference, I really recommend taking a look to those videos: GLS highlights.

There is some discussion of the social relevancy of games, some applications of video games to learning and some technological reflections (check out “Designing Games”, very good presentation).

And a note for the future: I will soon be publishing a number of posts reflecting on experiences applying real commercial games to learning environments. Think SimCity, Civilization, Tycoon series, etc.

A rather short entry after a rather long period of silence. But at least it is something.

<e-Game> is an educational tool. It was built with education in mind and a great part of its syntax has an educational flavour. However, <e-Game> is a tool that facilitates the development of any adventure game within the boundaries of its syntax.

Our new paper entitled “Production and Maintenance of Content-Intensive Videogames: A Document-Oriented Approach” explores the applications of <e-Game> as a tool for fast and cheap development of adventure games from a Software Engineering perspective. The elimination of technological barriers provided by <e-Game> allows it to be employed in different fields of serious gaming, such as advertising, dissemination of ideas, political campaigns, etc.

And its markup syntax provides a development model in which the author writes the script of the adventure (you can call it a storyboard if you want) and the script is then marked-up with the <e-Game> syntax. This very same script is then handed to the artists that will provide the art assests.

I will be presenting this development process during the ITNG 2006 Conference, which will be held in Las Vegas in April. After returning from the conference I will write the corresponding report and elaborate more in the possibilities offered by <e-Game> as a general development tool. Las Vegas, there I go… I think this is going to be fun.

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).

As every year, it was again the moment to visit the SIIE 2005 Conference. This is an international conference about Computers and Education which is held yearly alternating locations in Portugal and Spain. This year we all went to Portugal, and the conference was held in the beautiful Leiria.

Just like last year’s edition, the highlights were the friendliness of the organization committee and the domestic (yet exotic) feeling imbued by the fact that half of the presentations are in Portuguese and the other half in Spanish (note for foreigners: Spanish and Portuguese people can understand each other more or less provided we speak slowly).

The contributions had a good overall level (with a low acceptance ratio) and covered a variety of fields. About having fun while learning, there were a few contributions worth mentioning.

Guillermo Jiménez Díaz, Mercedes Gómez Albarrán and some other fellows from my own Complutense University of Madrid presented the paper “Visualización y Role-play en la Enseñanza de la Programación Orientada a Objetos” (Visualization and Role-play for teaching Object Oriented Programming). Role-play is a teaching/design method often used in Object Oriented Programming, where different people play the roles of different objects and simulate the passing of messages and control flow using a ball that is passed from person to person. The paper presented a 3D environment that simulates this activity. There is more information on the project’s website.

Filipa Filipe, Miriam Aguiar and some others presented the paper entitled “e-COPOS: Utilização de um jogo 3D como ferramenta de aprendizagem em e-Learning” (e-COPOS: Use of a 3D game as an e-learning tool). They have developed a beautiful and well-polished game about the relationship between alcohol and driving.

Finally, I wouldn’t want to end this report without commenting the friendliness of the organization committee with a special mention for Isabel Pereira, who acted as our host and struggled to make us happy during our stay in Leiria. Thank you!

This week I have assisted the SPDECE 2005 conference in Barcelona (Spain). The objective of this conference is to drive the evolution of the Learning Object Model in Spain, gathering a number of experts from a variety of fields. Most of the assistants are also part of RED-AOPA, a community of Hispanic researches involved in the domain of Learning Objects.

This contrasts with other conferences that focus mainly in the technological aspects of LOs, and the result is a conference with a unique flavour. If the experience during the SPDECE 2004 conference was interesting, this year has been as exciting and worthwhile.

Some may say that, in spite of the special publication for selected papers, the conference does not have a high-repercussion publication of the proceedings. However, this has a wonderful side-effect. Academics don’t come because it will look great in their CV, but because they are actually interested in the field and in seeing it become a reality. Because of this, most sessions derived in interesting discussions, with the experts in different domains doing their best to explain their points of view in a manner that would be understandable for academics from other fields.

All in all, a wonderful experience and I’m really looking forward to next year’s edition.