Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

As I said a few days ago, I have now returned from the 10º Congreso Internacional y 13º Nacional de Material Didáctico Innovador (International Conference on Innovative Educational Materials). My presentation was well-received by most of the audience, and I later got very valuable feedback from researchers in different fields.

The conference once started as a small gathering of researchers, mostly related to the field of Medicine. However, for the last 13 editions (yes! 13!) it has grown into a much bigger event, with high impact work and reputable presenters (and then me ). The organizers also treated me wonderfully, with a big display of effort and hospitality.

All in all, my visit to Mexico was a pleasure and I really hope I will be able to come back.

Some people asked for the slides of my presentation during the conference, so I have just uploaded them to SlideShare for anyone who wants to check them. You can find them here.

Research conferences, e-learning, educational games, travelling

I have been invited by the organizers of the 10º Congreso Internacional y 13º Nacional de Material Didáctico Innovador (International Conference on Innovative Educational Materials) to visit Mexico City next week.

There I will deliver a lecture about game-based learning. I am expecting a mixed audience on the topic of GBL: Supporters, detractors and just oblivious. Thus, I will start with a short pitch on the (potential) benefits about game-based learning. However, my intention goes beyond merely proselytizing.

In the last few years conducting GBL research, we have met more barriers than actual opportunities. In this talk I also try to raise awareness on the fact that GBL, no matter how exciting, is still an emerging trend with little solid facts about their power as educational tools. Society is not really ready for games, which are still considered as an industry that only targets male kids (and actually, only targets them in order to turn them into psychopaths). In addition, digital games can be disruptive in a classroom and will certainly meet more opposition than support from teachers. I will try to review these potential issues and give some ideas about how to tackle these problems, including our own research.

I hope I will be able to provoke a reaction on the audience, reducing the opposition or detractors, challenging supporters to think about new research questions and, most of all, sparking new ideas in the mind of those oblivious to games as an educational medium.

I will let you know whether I succeeded in a couple of weeks (or in three months, given my blogging habits).

Research conferences, educational games, game design, 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

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

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/

Research articles, conferences, educational games, travelling

For those outside the Computer Science publications arena, Lecture Notes in Computer Science was initially a journal/book series, with a relatively high relevance in the field (JCR indexed, Computer Science Schools would systematically buy every issue, etc.). Around 2004-2005, the series transitioned to a higher rythm of publications. It is now publishing hundreds of volumes per year, with proceedings different conferences on the field.

In terms of evaluating research, this has meant a descent in its perceived prestige in the field. In 2006 it was removed from the JCR listings. In any case, even if it had remained, its indexing would be so low that it wouldn’t be worth it (so many articles cannot get enough references).

Maybe as a reaction to this, or maybe simply to diversify Springer’s product range, LNCS is now launching the so-called journal sub-lines. These are series of LNCS volumes that have a fixed editorial board.

One of these sublines is of special interest for my area: Transactions on Edutainment. I am very glad to say that we were invited to publish a paper on the first volume. After our success in the GDTW2007 conference, where we received the “Best Paper Award”, we were told to submit an extended version for that first volume. It has now been published and the final draft is available at the
<e-UCM> website. This is the complete reference:

Pablo Moreno-Ger, Carl Blesius, Paul Currier, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón: Online Learning and Clinical Procedures: Rapid Development and Effective Deployment of Game-Like Interactive Simulations. Transactions on Edutainment I, LNCS 5080, pp. 288–304. 2008.

The question that now remains open is what will happen in the future to these series. Will they gather the prestige of a journal? Maybe even enter the JCR as an independent series? Time will tell, but I think game-based learning (or Edutainment) deserves its own dedicated JCR-level journal.

Research articles, educational games

In the last few years, the concept of the “Learning Objects Model” has been a keystone in the discussion of web-based learning (and even learning in general). The model suggests that content can be composed as small self-contained units that can then be contained. The perspective is very interesting: If every piece of educational content is created in a self-contained and reusable way, it would be possible to create huge courses simply combining these objects as LEGO bricks.

The model will only work if these pieces of content can be easily identified (in a repository, for example) and can be deployed together in, say, a Learning Managament System. For this reason, there have been huge efforts in the direction of standardizing these procedures. The IMS Content Packaging specification defines how we should distribute these Learning Objects so that they can be deployed in different platforms without an adaptation effort. When it comes to “discovering” these Learning Objects in a repository, we need standardized metadata (like IEEE LOM or DublinCore) that allows us to search in these repositories and quickly decide if the LO is suitable for our needs. Some higher-level initiatives combine different standards and propose a generic model for the deployment of online materials (ADL SCORM would be the most relevant example).

The model, as most things, has faithful believers and angry opponents. Personally, I haven’t decided yet. I do believe that the idea of resuing educational content is good (it sort of works in programming) but tend to reject the concept of standardized content. Without standard students, standard content seems like a bad idea. This is one of the reasons why I think game-based learning is good and adaptive game-based learning is great.

However, I also believe that the current e-learning infrastructure can be leveraged as a deployment method. E-Learning parcipants (developers, instructors and students) are more open to new ideas than the traditional school participants. Besides, most schools and universities are shifting towards a blended learning (b-learning) approach that combines traditional classes with e-learning technologies. A teacher from an online training environment, a school or a university can use an e-learning platform to send the games to the students so that they can play with them at home.

Putting both ideas together, my idea was that we could encapsulate the games as standards-compliant Learning Objects so that they can deployed by a teacher in (mostly) any Learning Management System and played by the students at home. Additionally, if the games are labelled with standardized metadata, they can be stored and discovered in content repositories, which seems like a good a idea in itself.

We are trying to support and test this idea with the <e-Adventure> platform. Thanks to the programming talent displayed by Javier Torrente, from version 0.3 <e-Adventure> supports tagging the games with IEEE LOM metadata and then exporting them as IMS packages. We will soon be publishing a detailed report on our experiences, which include successful deployment of the games in platforms such as WebCT and Moodle, and easy inclusion of the games in bigger modules using the Reload Editor.

In the meantime, why don’t you try for yourself? Download the new version, export your game as a Learning Object and try to deploy it in your LMS of choice. We will be waiting for your kind feedback.

Research e-learning, educational games

The March issue of Computer (an IEEE magazine) includes a report on the development process model behind <e-Adventure> as included in my thesis. The full citation is:

Pablo Moreno-Ger, Iván Martínez-Ortiz, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, “A Content-Centric Development Process Model,” Computer, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 24-30, Mar., 2008

An this is its brief abstract:

Working from the belief that when content is king, content experts should lead, a storyboard-driven approach provides a sound methodology for developing educational games that helps ensure that no good storyboard becomes a bad game.

Let us know your feedback!

(we will publish the original draft at the <e-UCM> website soon)

Research articles, educational games, game design, software engineering

Aww, crap, I did it again… Once more I have managed to neglect my blog for more than two months. Quite a feat, indeed.

For the comeback, I will be completing the post that I left uncompleted about four months ago. In the post Integrating games and e-learning (pt. 1) I discussed Aldrich’s six stages for new technologies and ideas, concluding that educational videogames were slowly entering a critical phase where public awareness and the expectations generated by the media put a pressure on any future game-based learning initiative.

As I stated in that post, the value of games as an educational tool is barely disputed in the academic field. The debate has moved on to discuss if they are cost-effective (is there a real ROI if you spend a million dollars in an educational product?) and how we can introduce educational videogames and game-like simulations in the current educational system without disconnecting them from the rest of the curriculum. The post ended with the open question of how to overcome those issues, which is the topic of my thesis.

I would like to focus this discussion on the second issue, the integration of the games with the rest of the educational process. A typical target for educational gaming is K-12 education. Often this is because we consider that only children play games. This is an idea that I strongly dispute, but that’s not the point of this post. Taking a step back from the concept of regulated schools, other environments may be willing to use game-based learning approaches. In particular, the e-learning arena is currently evolving to meet the challenge of improving the quality of the learning experiences and compensating the consequences of the separation from the instructor (e.g. lack of motivation, the inability to detect students that require additional support, etc.). This has caused e-learning technologies to move beyond the concept of mere static-content repositories, becoming complex environments that manage learning experiences, allowing the interaction between instructors and students, giving the instructor the ability to monitor student progress, and offering complex interaction mechanisms that improve the learning experiences: They are the so-called Learning Management Systems (LMS).

The field is ripe for the introduction of game-based learning. LMS vendors are constantly reinventing the concept trying to explore new alternatives that may give them a competitive advantage. In addition, focusing our efforts on the introduction of educational videogames in these environments allows us to leverage the existing technological infrastructure and facilitates the the integration of the games with the rest of activities in the instructional design.

Additionally, even though these e-learning systems were born as an alternative to traditional (schooled) learning, they are currently being used to enrich and complement those traditional models in what has been branded the b-learning approach (as in blended learning). I consider that the integration with modern e-learning environments can be a base on which to build an educational model that combines all the elements previously identified: The role of the instructor, the importance of rich instructional designs, the use of traditional contents, and leveraging the benefits of educational videogames. Additionally, given the current trend towards the adoption of b-learning approaches, the benefits can have an impact on both online learning environments and traditional environments willing to embrace blended approaches.

In the development of the <e-Adventure> platform, we always had LMS platforms in mind. The engine can be deployed as a Java Applet through any web system, just like any other kind of web content. The problem is, if we simply do that, we only get the advantages of any other kind of web content. Games can be dynamically adapted, they can generate traces of the activity of the student and even perform automatic assessment. Those are all desirable features in online learning, and all that we need is to connect the games with the LMS (and thus with the rest of the learning experience). That’s the reason why the <e-Adventure> platform includes an API that enables the communication between <e-Adventure> games and LMS platforms, as well as a reference implementation of the API on both the client and the server sides.

When the games are deployed through a compliant LMS (in our current state, that means an LMS that follows the IMS Learning Design specification), they establish a communication link through this API, and use this channel to exchange adaptation and assessment information with the LMS.

We are only beginning to explore the possibilities of this integration and the learning patterns that emerge. For more information about this integration and its educational possibilities, I recommed reading our paper Adaptive Units of Learning and Educational Videogames, recently published in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.

Research e-learning, educational games