Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

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

So, last week we started the classes at the School of Computer Science. I must confess that, even though I try to keep my students engaged by querying them during the class, I am not really using game-based content or game-like activities.

I have been reflecting about this. Is it a hypocrisy to preach that we should be using games in education and teach a traditional lesson? The fact is, I would love to be using games in my subjects, but I can’t.

To begin with, I really don’t have the time. Balancing an active research activity (with experiments, development, articles) with a proper preparation of my classes is demanding from me 70+ hours per week.

Additionally, there are different student groups with different teachers, and we are coordinated (same contents, same exam, same correction criteria). The safest approach, both for me and my students, is thus to stick to the traditional method one more year. Do my lectures. Engage them through traditional means. Be professional.

But it’s slightly depressing. The other day I was telling some first year students about life in the university, and how teachers are, most of all, researchers. But when it came to telling them about my field, I decided not to. I didn’t want any of them to ask me “will we be using games in class?”.

The closest thing I will be doing to game-based learning will be to propose games as the practical exercises for the 3rd year Programming Lab. At least it’s something until next year, when I have promised myself I that I will apply what I preach.

Personal educational games, reflections, teaching

After summarizing 3 years of work in a 50-minute presentation  and 60 minutes of questioning , everything ended in victory and celebration. I got the highest possible grade and some very nice words from the members of the committee. The dissertation, entitled “A Documental Approach to the Creation and Integration of Educational Videogames in Virtual Learning Environments”, basically includes all the work around <e-Adventure> during the last years.

Although the document includes a thorough list of academic acknowledgements (along with some personal ones), people tend not to read them. Thus, I thought I would at least send a greeting to the people that stayed around me while creating this work and knowingly or unknowingly participated in this. And I will use this blog for that (which, ironically, people tend not to read either).

Looking at my publications it’s obvious that my advisor Baltasar and my colleagues José Luis and Iván have worked as much as myself in this project. It is not all that obvious that a lot of the implementation work was done by my wonderful students Bruno, Francisco and Eduardo. They are now starting their professional careers and my best wishes are with them.

Also, I have travelled around the world during this project. 9 months out of 16 living abroad, which took a huge personal toll but at the same time allowed me to meet some wonderful people that compensated all the loneliness of travelling.

In Boston I stayed twice at the LCS. My host, Carl, along with Henry and Cathy made my stay possible. There, I worked with a lot of very interesting people, like Dave, Caroline or Paul. I also met wonderful friends such as Katie, Mark, Netta, Ishir, Mike, Ana or Liz; they all made me feel welcome and at home in Boston. So did my “family” in Boston, Michael and John. Others, such as Greg or Bill made a deep impression (on personal and professional levels) that they are probably unaware of.

In the grey and cold Netherlands I was hosted by Daniel and I also met Gemma. They were both friendly and welcoming when I needed it most. In Coimbra I was hosted by Toze, and the trip allowed me to meet Marta, Paola and Gema. Back in Madrid, people such as my family and Raquel were missing me. It was probably unpleasant for them, but there is a part of me that appreciates being missed.

In the end it was worth the effort, and I’m happy to publish in this blog the two most important documents I have generated so far:  My dissertation and the slides from the defence.

Personal reflections, travelling

Well, many things.

To begin with you have to write a post apologizing. And even if you do that, you still loose credibility and readership. Unfortunately, my credibility as a blogger is probably at an all-time low. On the bright side of things, judging by comments and analytics, I never had a huge reader base, which means that the three or four of you will probably forgive me.

You also tend to need to explain WHY you neglected the blog for a month. Well, my reason is a very complicated month in which a lot of things have happend. To begin with, I registered my PhD. dissertation thesis. I have also pre-defended it internally and registered it for the actual defence. The huge effort required for that meant that I accumulated a lot of work that I am still pushing forward. Additionally, I travelled to the GDTW 2007 conference/workshop, which happened to be highly disruptive workwise but extremely gratifying and interesting. Honestly though, there have been other major events that have completely shattered my concentration and changed my life, although they don’t belong in a research blog.

Another consequence is comment-spam. 1500 spams in the moderation queue. That is an unsustainable amount and I have thus decided to disable pingbacks for good. I had the good eye to spot two legitimate comments among the huge spam, but I might have accidentally deleted something I shouldn’t. In that case, I’m sorry. I also have taken some other anti-spam measures for the future.

Things seem to be getting a bit more relaxed lately, and so I feel confident I will able to bring back the weekly(-ish) posting pace. Wish me luck. I am preparing posts about my thesis, about the GDTW2007 conference and the second part of my reflection on educational videogames and e-learning.

By the way, should I fail to keep this promise next week and in case anyone is interested, I will be defending my thesis and (hopefully) become a doctor on Friday, Novemeber 30th, at the UCM School of Computer Science at noon.

Personal blogging

Dear thesis:

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here in Portugal. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually a scientific work.

Every scientific work on this planet is the result of a natural equilibrium between creativity, a relaxed and open-minded attitude, and the natural talent of scientific researchers, but you theses are not. When I should be working on you, procrastinating habits appear and multiply and multiply until every time resource is consumed… and the only way I can actually work on you is to ingest vast amounts of caffeine and spread the work to the wee hours of the night.

There is another type of work that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A Program. PhD theses are a form of source code, another by-product of caffeine. You’re a program and I am a programmer.

Let’s get back to work.

Personal reflections

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.

Personal reflections

Haven’t I used that title before?

Just a quick post to remind myself that I’m not dead, that I supposedly maintain a blog and that my vacations haven’t started yet. Mostly bad news.

I’m currently trying to put together all the stuff I’ve done in the last few years about games and learning in a big boring document that noone will ever read but that my advisor strongly feels I should write and won’t allow me not to do it. He calls it a thesis or something like that. Sigh.

Personal reflections, travelling

I want my own cease & desist letter from the MPAA.

Personal

This blog is part of the efforts of the <e-UCM> research group to bring online our activity, disseminate our results, and get online exposure.

But, unfortunately, the task is not as simple as it sounds. The members of our group work hard in their corresponding fields (both researching and teaching) and online activity usually comes in just as an after-thought. As long as the group is focused in online education, this is something we should be ashamed of. And yes, we are.

This is the reason why from the beginning of 2007 (call it a new year’s resolution if you will) we have been focusing on the improvement of our web presence. One of the first steps was to bring forward a renewed version of the official <e-UCM> website with updated information, including a publication list and offering drafts of relevant publications for direct download. This step is not finished, although we have certainly improved the quality of the information available there.

Another step (which directly affects me) was the already announced publication of a fresh and renewed website for the <e-Adventure> project and to keep updating this blog. Well, the website is there and this is a blog update. What now?

Personal blogging, reflections

The server has been down for a few days. At least it was Christmas time, so it is unlikely that anyone actually tried to access the blog in the meantime.

The reason for the downtime was that the website was being moved to a brand new server. This is plan of a masterplan in which most of the <e-UCM> related websites are going to experience a lot of changes in the following weeks. Yes, including a brand new <e-Game> project website. The current stub will be gone soon. This time for good. Promised. And this time I’m serious. In fact, another person is doing the new website, that’s why I promise without blushing.

Personal blogging