Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

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.

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.

It’s been ages since I last posted something. Time constraints this year are being worse than ever and I hardly find the time to write (interesting) things. Just to remind everyone (including me) that I still maintain this blog, I wanted to give a brief overview of the current state of the <e-Adventure> family of platforms.

Yes, I said family.

I am assuming that readers of this blog are already familiar with the <e-Adventure> platform. Almost one year ago, I introduced in this blog the <e-Adventure3D> platform, a 3D version of the same approach to educational gaming. During the last year, we have also been working on a mobile version designed to work in mobile phones, with the idea that it would be possible to create a 2D adventure game using the <e-Adventure> editor and then “export” it suiting different mobile devices.

We have been busy in the last few months promoting this family of platforms all around the world. First, I presented a very early prototype of the mobile platform (<m-Adventure>) at the DIGITEL 2008 conference in Banff, Canada (and I wrote about it).

Then, I went to Japan to present for the first time our <e-Adventure3D> platform in an academic event, the ACM Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE 2008). The presentation was very successful, mostly because the platform is really cool. I really hope we can push this development further. This is the full citation (remember that you can always find all our publications at the <e-UCM> website):

Javier Torrente, Guillermo Cañizal, Ángel del Blanco, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008): < e-Adventure3D>: An Open Source Authoring Environment for 3D Adventure Games in Education. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2008). December 2008, Yokohama, Japan.

Only a few weeks ago, Pablo Lavín went to Jordan to present a newer, much improved version of <m-Adventure>, where he spoke about our flexible architecture designed to support multiple exportation profiles at the IMCL 2009 conference. This is the citation:

Pablo Lavín-Mera, Javier Torrente, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2009): Mobile Game Development for Multiple Devices in Education. In proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Mobile and Computer-Aided Learning (IMCL 2009), Amman, Jordan.

At the core of all these products, is the notion of using a Learning Management System as a central point in game-based learning activities. Javier Torrente recently traveled to Liverpool to present our work in how to coordinate heterogeneous game platforms (including <e-Adventure>) using a Learning Management System as a persistence layer. The presentation was very succesful and received the Best Paper Award from the Programme Committee at the GDTW 2008 conference. This is the full citation:

Javier Torrente, Pablo Lavín-Mera, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008).  Coordinating Heterogeneous Game-based Learning Approaches in Online Learning Environments. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Game Design and Technology Workshop and Conference (GDTW2008), pages 27-36. Liverpool, UK.

As you may see, in spite of the long silences in this blog, our research line is more active than ever. We are being pleasantly successful with our products and really anxious to see how far we can go. And soon you will all get a glimpse of our recent progress. Stay tuned for the inminent release of <e-Adventure> 1.0, which right now looks awesome.

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?

The article we wrote in cooperation between the <e-UCM> research group and the Educational Technology Expertise Center from the Open University of the Netherlands has finally been published in the latest volume of Simulation & Gaming.

The article describes the integration of the <e-Adventure> platform with IMS Learning Design environments, implemented over the CopperCore platform.

This is the complete reference:

Daniel Burgos, Pablo Moreno-Ger, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Marcus Specht, Rob Koper: Building Adaptive Game-Based Learning Resources: The Marriage of IMS Learning Design and . Simulation & Gaming 39, pp. 414-431. 2008

As usual, the final draft is available for download at the <e-UCM> website.

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 7th Framework Programme and we don’t. 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/

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.

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)

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).