Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

In my classes, I always try to keep track of those students that come to the recitations well-prepared, and that participate actively in class. While participation has never been part of the grade, I have traditionally used that information whenever I come across a border-line grade: Is this an A or a B? In addition, since only 1 in 20 students can get the A+ grade, I also use my participation records to decide which students gets the A+ in case of a tie, as I may find that I have 5 students with a 10/10 in the exam but can only award three A+ grades.

This year, I am teaching a Programming Fundamentals course for the new ECTS-compliant program in computer science, in which 10% of the grade is explicitly assigned to evaluate participation in class and contribution in optional tasks. I thus wanted to keep track of those students that completed different exercises and tasks throughout the course. I have typically done this by writing down the names of those students that deserve recognition, and keep a track of what we usually call “positives” in the school slang.

However, this year the students are split into groups for the recitations, and we have planned lessons in which all the students have to try to complete an exercise in class. Tracking “positives” was bound to be cumbersome, and I actually hate the term. I needed something different.

I have thus set up an experiment with my students. I have generated a set of 9-digit codes and printed them in small pieces of paper that we bring to the recitations in the lab. And instead of writing down the names of the students that do well, we give them one of these tokens with a code. By the end of the course, I will be asking the students to send back to me a list of the codes they have gathered. I will then crib out duplicated or forged codes (I have the means to verify them) and use this information to adjust their grades.

So, how is this different from writing down their names? The process is actually more cumbersome, and can be gamed by the students to some extent. Why bother then?

Well, I believe that it is working out because now the students are made responsible for tracking their participation. The physical token, although simple, still makes a deeper impact that simply seeing me write down a name, just like casino chips are more appealing than digital money in a digital casino. Moreover, in some of the sessions there is a chance of walking out with a handful of codes, and ending up with a small stack of tokens at home. The students can compare and compete, something that was not possible through traditional means.

I believe that this is more interesting than the typical approach and the students (at least some of them) are responding well. Some other teachers have mentioned that this is akin to treating them like children, but this I hear this so often whenever I try to gamify any process that I really don’t care as long as it works.

And some of the students are beginning to understand and leverage the trick to walk out with a stack of tokens: to study the subject matter and try to solve the exercises before coming to the lab. Precisely.

In what has now become an established tradition, we will be running a seminar on game design for e-learning environments for students of the School of Computer Engineering at Complutense University.

This is our ad for this year’s seminar:

This will be our fourth edition, and we will use the same approach as previous years: The first two weeks, we (the coordinators) will do most of the talking, presenting our ideas and experiences on educational game design. After that, the students get the spotlight and propose their own ideas.

The following 7 weeks the students form groups and each group develops an educational game with complete freedom to decide their topic, genre, design, contents and technology. Of course we always suggest using e-Adventure, but we never enforce it. Many of the most successful projects produced in these seminars have been e-Adventure games, but last year’s winner was, in fact, created with RPGMaker.

Did I say winner? Yes, the seminar output is not a quantitative grade (only pass/fail), but the last day we do hold a public presentation party and let the students vote which is the best game.

August is finally here, and it was about time I had a vacation!

Last year I was in Boston and that pretty much prevented me from taking a proper long vacation. Although I will not disconnect entirely, this year I’m planning to take the month easy and get some rest, preparing for a very intense start of the course in September (both professionally and personally).

This means that I will not be posting (and probably not tweeting) again until September. In anticipation of this blank period, just a quick reflection on the experiment about increasing my posting rate. Early June I decided to try to publish around a post per week and a tweet per day. That post was 8 weeks ago (and 38 work-days ago). Counting the experiment post and this specific one, I have published 9 posts since then (and 39 tweets).

As I said, I don’t mind whether any of the posts was relevant or any the tweets was read by anyone. the good news is that it seems like I can keep the pace. Let’s just hope I don’t loose the habit after the summer break.

In any case, for anyone reading, have a nice summer and see you in September!

After completing a 4-month process in mid-october and nearly another month of paperwork, my promotion to Associate Professor is now complete. More specifically, I am now a “Profesor Contratado Doctor” and it is a tenured, non-civil servant position, with teaching and research duties.

Obviously, this promotion means a lot for me. After many years in which I have sustained myself through short-term grants and temporary contracts as a lecturer, this is a great change. It is the confirmation that I can devote the rest of my life to research and teaching, which are my real passions (in fact, my main research area is actually education). From this foundation, I now have the freedom to pursue new projects and ambitious objectives without being constrained by short-term requirements. It is a dream that has come true. This is what I wanted to do in my life, and having this work secured for life seems like the most significant step in my career so far.

My only regret is that this had to be achieved through a competitive process against some colleagues and friends from my department. I really wish them the best luck in the future so that they can also feel this relief.

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.

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

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!

After having ranted about google’s blogging environment ever since my second post, I have finally decided to move on and try WordPress. The advantages? I’m hosting this myself, the system is much easier to use, the design is cleaner, and I can finally introduce categories. The widget system is pretty cool too. For example, since I blog sporadically but read a lot, I have linked to the “share this” feature of Google Reader so that when I read something interesting in the net, a link will appear here.

After investing far more hours than I really should have (procrastinating? me? never!) I think that everything is ready to roll. The feed seems to be working fine and, after some ModRewrite magic, most of the old links still work and redirect to their WordPress equivalents. Expect some changes in appearance over the next few days (I really need a new banner, I’m accepting suggestions). Also expect some eventual bumps as I will often break things when fiddling with WP’s goodies.

Fnally, please let me hear your feedback, especially if you notice something broken.

…or perhaps I should say, “To blog with a third party or not to blog with a third party?”

When I decided to start this small side project I considered the possibility of coding a small blog engine with some server-side technology (be it PHP or full-blown J2EE). I thought that putting together some code to post, some code for comments and such wouldn’t be too difficult.

Then I decided that I would need to add further security checks (we don’t want a kid writing php code in the comment window, do we?). If I wanted to categorize my content that would mean more coding. If I wanted to put some kind of search facility, that is still more coding. And I had no clue on how to code RSS feeds or trackback systems.

And then, I found out about blogger, google’s blog community. That was my solution! It had all the coding done, and it would be hosted in google-ish servers (thus rising my position in search engines). I quickly set up my blog there, made a couple of adjustements and we have a blog!

Alas, blogger doesn’t include categories. And it does provide “searching” functionality, but it is embedded in a banner that I dislike. And I can’t remove that banner unless I host the blog in my machine.

Right now the blog is in my machine, has no categories and has no search funtionality. That makes me reconsider my initial design… I could code something like this, perhaps better, in only a few days, barring the part of learning about RSS and trackback… Now, will I do it?

…and this blog came to life. It would be customary to say something brilliant in the first post but, sadly, that will not happen.

With time, I will use this blog mostly to spread my research work in the fields of game-based learning and simulation-based learning. I will also post reflections about the field itself and try to point out interesting advances achieved by others.

Finally, some personal commentaries may appear here and there but, by now, that is not the main objective of this blog.

Enjoy!