Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

My research group is involved in the newly created Network of Excellence in Serious Games, funded by the EU to promote Serious games and Game-based Learning by gathering different research teams across Europe. It was about time…

As our field matures, it is becoming increasingly fragmented. Any time I go to a conference, most researchers agree in that “there’s a lot to be done”. So many open research questions. Lacking a proper direction (it is not even obvious what we should be measuring), a lot of researchers end up working in parallel on the same topics. I noticed this for example seeing how closely related were e-Adventure and the 80Days project (adaptive learning with adventure games). Hopefully, with the creation of this network we will increase communication, manage to focus on a vision of the future of serious games, and provide a forum to discuss the progress of game-based learning as a mature research field.

On Sunday my colleague Iván and me will travel to Genoa for a 3-day kick-off meeting. I’m looking forward to meeting the rest of participants and see the potential of the network.

Jeannette Espinoza contacted me a year and a half ago and mentioned that she was enrolled in a graduate course on Developmental Psychology at Complutense, and that she was preparing a short documentary feature treating the relationship between games and motivation.

I agreed to participate with a short interview and now the documentary is available here (sorry, Spanish only): http://vimeo.com/14251116

I think that it is a very interesting and informative piece, regardless of how bad my scarce interventions seem to me.

For anyone thinking that I had actually taken a two-month vacation, I wish you were right. It’s been a hectic return from vacation, with trips, exams and setting up a new course. We are starting our classes next week, and I am both thrilled and a bit overwhelmed with this exciting new course.

This year I’m going to be teaching a brand new course in Programming Fundamentals that marks the start of Bologna-compliant grades in our school. We are changing mostly everything about how we teach this subject, adopting a model that favors day-to-day work rather than a single high-stakes final exam. In theory, this should be better for the students. Studying in small amounts, having smaller groups and having numerous evaluations and reviewed practical exercises sound like good learning principles.

However, how this will work in practice is an unknown. The average student here simply does not go to class. Last year, in one of my groups with 71 enrolled students, the average attendance at the beginning of the semester was 18, a number that dropped to 9 by the last month. This suggests that schedule compatibility and the model based in a single exam seriously affected attendance. On the other hand, only one of the students with over 90% attendance throughout the course ended up failing the exam. Does this suggest that day-to-day attendance and work facilitate passing? Most likely, although this could also be a mere correlation: good students that would pass anyway tend to attend lectures.

What will happen now? Will students maintain low attendance ratios and try to pass with the minimum compulsory attendance (their top potential grade would be capped at 60%)? Will students actually focus, attend lectures and pass more easily? Will we have students attending but failing? Even if it is a lot more work, I am happy to be involved in this new course experience. This is change in how we teach. Not a dramatic change, but a change nonetheless. And if we do it right, we will demonstrate that university teaching and learning can change after all.

I have already mentioned briefly that we have been working with our colleagues in the Department of Physiology at UCM’s Medical School. This collaboration goes back to around 3 years ago, when I met Lola Comas and Carmen Fernández Galaz at a focus group in the School of Education.

We spoke briefly about <e-Adventure>, the kind of games and simulations that could be created and we decide to meet later to discuss potential collaborations. In the end, we decided to create a brief simulation to rehearse the steps of a practical exercise in which the students have to measure Hematocrit levels in a blood sample. This practical exercise is performed once in the course, using blood samples from sacrificed laboratory rats. For this reason, students are not allowed to recreate the exercise out of the scheduled session.

The key idea of developing a simulation game covering the steps of the exercise is that students would be able to practice the exercise at their own pace before going to the lab, thus becoming familiar with the steps of the procedure and later on getting more profit out of the time-limited lab experience. In addition, the students would later be able to practice the virtual version of the exercise before the exam to refresh the procedure. The result is what we call the HTC game, a virtual practical exercise developed with <e-Adventure> using photographs of the actual workbench at the lab, and that can be directly deployed through the Virtual Campus at Complutense Unversity.

The results of the experience have been very interesting. We conducted an experiment separating the students into an Experimental and a Control Group, letting the former play a few days before the actual session and sending the latter directly to the lab. The students in the EC found the practical exercise easier, demonstrated a better grasp on the concept and even made fewer mistakes.

All in all, a great success that we reported an article submitted to the International Journal of Medical Informatics, which published the final version recently. Here is the full citation:

Pablo Moreno-Ger, Javier Torrente, Julián Bustamante, Carmen Fernández-Galaz, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, María Dolores Comas-Rengifo: Application of a low-cost web-based simulation to improve students’ practical skills in medical education. Int. J. Med. Inform. Vol 79, pp. 459-467, (2010)

The article includes a link to download the game, which can also be found (in English and Spanish) in the <e-Adventure> website. In addition, if you don’t have access to IJMI, our self-archived copy of the draft is also available at the <e-UCM> website repository.

Yes, with a 7-month delay. In January 2009 I published a post summarizing my research activity in 2008. It ended with a question to myself: Would I be able to pull out another year as intense as 2008?

Well, let’s see…

• The growth of the <e-Adventure> platform continued at an even higher pace. The incorporation of brilliant programmers like Eugenio or Ángel (and Javier, who had already been working with the platform) accelerated our development speed. We published version 0.9 with a ton of changes and then finally 1.0. During the year we reached an average of 150 downloads per month (with more than 300 in November and December).
• After some key publications, <e-Adventure> was well very well received by the local media and we were interviewed a few times.
• I completed my first year of full-teaching duties, and used it to play some educational games in the classroom and to promote game programming among my students.
• We finished a first iteration porting the <e-Adventure> engine to Java-based mobile devices, and started a second iteration focusing on the Android platform.
• We collaborated a lot with the school of medicine at UCM, creating educational simulations with <e-Adventure> to complement practical exercises, performing tests with students and publishing the results. Summary: Playing provided a better understanding of the practical exercises and better grades.
• We opened new lines of research within <e-Adventure>, focusing on accessibility, new game-writing methodologies and new software and plugins for version 2.0 (more on this on a later post).
• I went to the Lab of Computer Science in Boston again. This time I went there for six months thanks to a grant from Real Colegio Complutense. I worked with Carl in new types of game-based learning, including a rather interesting game about how to properly package hazardous materials for shipping.
• I participated in 14 research publications (including journals, conferences and workshops)
• I attended only one conference: MatDidac 2010. I was invited to give one of the keynote sessions.
• Most importantly: I secured a tenured Associate Professor position at Complutense University.

Again, a pretty intense year. 2010 is also looking good so far, with my tenured position and increasing involvement in different projects. The diversification of e-Adventure as a test-bed for different lines of research is exciting and seems to be yielding interesting results.

I will let you know once the year finishes. I just hope I will remember to do my yearly report in January this time.

I am sitting in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in Bari, where the ISIE 2010 confernece is taking place. This is a huge conference (700+ attendees), most of them Electrical or Industrial Engineers. It feels weird to attend a conference in which most people are specialized in topics I only know shallowly (from my first years in college).

Then you may be thinking, “and what are you doing there?” Well, presenting a paper, of course.

This is the complete reference (no page numbers, the physical proceedings are not ready yet):

Roberto Tornero, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Javier Torrente, Baltasar Fernández Manjón (2010). CS Training: Introducing Mobile Educational Games in the Learning Flow. In proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Engineering (ISIE 2010). July 2010, Bari, Italy.

In this article we describe a line of research we officially opened about one year ago, working on the use of the Nintendo DS game console as an educational tool. We gathered ideas from Brain Training and created a game for practicing Computer Engineering exercises, named CS Training.

We have developed 10 mini-games related to different subjects in the computing curricula, and joined them together in a game similar to Brain Training (aka Brain Age, Train your Brain, etc.). These games can be practiced on the Nintendo DS anywhere and anytime, without pressure or limitations.

However, things start getting interesting when we use the “Evaluation mode”. This mode allows each student to take a measured challenge once a day. When the student starts the challenge, we use the console’s Wi-Fi connection to start a session on a Moodle server (entering user name and password on the console) and download a list of CSTraining-enabled courses. The student selects the course and the game begins!

In this mode, the DS will query the Moodle server to check which games should be presented to the student. The student completes the challenges, the game computes a final score and submits the score to Moodle. The coolest part? You can make these scores public and let the students compete for the best score.

Right now it is fully playable on the Nintendo DS, and we are working on a new and improved version including an editor. It is a very exciting project, I hope the community will like it.

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.

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).

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.

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 students 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 prototypical 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 typical 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.