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.

Research articles, educational games, teaching

In my last post I mentioned how, after we released <e-Adventure> v1.0, we split our development in two branches.

The first branch was focused on short-term improvements and on adding new simple functionality to our existing model. This line included GUI improvements, general optimizations and new features such as “Drag and drop”, a revamped conversation system or new exportation profiles. As I said in that post, the result of that line of work is the publication of <e-Adventure> v1.2. We have already published a release candidate, which we expect to make final within the next few weeks.

This version marks the end of this line of work. Version 1.2 will continue to be improved and supported, with minor tweaks and solutions to emerging bugs. However, this also our feature-freeze point, and no new things are expected to make it into that branch.

On the other hand, this allows us to concentrate our efforts in what we internally call <e-Adventure> 2.0, which is our current research & innovation platform/sandbox. Among many things, these are the main lines of work within <e-Adventure> 2.0:

• WEEV: Weev is the ongoing thesis project being developed by Eugenio Marchiori, proposing a new metaphor for game creation and visual languages to “weave” stories without thinking about flags and variables. The story of the game and the state changes can be defined with a high level of abstraction using the visual language, and these settings are automatically converted into an <e-Adventure> game with all the flags and conditions correctly configured.
• Android integration: We already have the engine working in Android phones (see our preview) and the next step is to provide an automatic exportation profile to the editor. <e-Adventure> 2.0 will support reading QR-codes or using GPS data to trigger effects when the games are exported to an Android phone, and the editor will allow the configuration of these aspects (we need to do them manually right now).
• Accesibility: We have already invested a lot of effort in integrating accessibility features into our games. The next step is to make the editor as accessible as possible, and we are working in this line with Technosite.
• Plug-in architecture for the editor and the engine. The key point here is to allow independent development of new features, affecting the engine, the editor or both.
• New integration architecture, with new ideas and protocols for the integration with Learning Management Systems
• New completely revamped GUI: We are working in the development of our own look & feel, giving a unified appearance to all our projects and (hopefully) solving our ongoing cross-platform GUI issues.

Each of these lines of work would deserve its own post describing it. I will try focus on some of them in the next few weeks.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

For the last year, <e-Adventure> development has been split in two main branches. On the one hand, we kept working on the current <e-Adventure> platform, solving bugs, adding a few new features and tweaking some things that we learned could be improved. On the other hand, we started a new development branch, which we internally call <e-Adventure> 2.0.

I will elaborate on what’s brewing for 2.0 in a future post, but today I would like to announce the first line has finally seen the light as <e-Adventure> 1.2. We have published a Release Candidate online and, as usual, we would like to hear some feedback about it. Among the major changes, I think that the “Drag & Drop” feature is the most novel, and covers an often requested improvement. We are excited about the potential uses for this new interaction.

Also, after our experiences with users at the Lab of Computer Science, we have added a new layer of flexibility to the conversations, and it is now possible to configure aspects such as waiting for a user click before changing text lines or having the option to display/hide the last line before a branch (so that we can ask questions and let the question remain onscreen while the student thinks about the answer).

Less prominent would be our new icon set, the performance improvements (both for the editor and the engine) and a reduced installation (which also translates in smaller applets when exporting for the web). Oh! And we also have community-contributed translations to Portuguese and German!

All in all, it is a great improvement, and we would like everyone to try it out. You will not be disappointed. Once we have gathered some feedback, we will release version 1.2 “proper”.

<e-Adventure> educational games

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.

Research articles, conferences, e-learning, educational games

e-Adventure was born with the objective of reducing the barriers for game-based learning adoption. As such, it was a platform that attempted to make it simpler for small development teams, or even individual instructors, to create their own educational adventure games without any programming knowledge.

Five years later, I believe we have been successful, and I’m proud of how e-Adventure is maturing as an open platform, at a rate of 300 monthly downloads, and with new features and usability features added on every release.

In the past three years we have been organizing courses at different Spanish education institutions, such as universities or high schools, with one clear objective: To teach teachers how to teach with e-Adventure.

So far the reception has been great. Teachers like the courses, enjoy using the platform and always give us back positive and valuable feedback.

The organization is simple: For two entire days (or three days with half-day sessions) we walk the participants through the constructions of a complete game using the e-Adventure platform. We usually start with a short motivation and context lecture, and then one of my colleagues (usually Javier or Ángel) go step by step through the construction of the game, while I walk among the participants bringing anyone who lags behind up to speed. This method works great, as it allows us to impose a reasonably high pace without being concerned (or interrupted) by people getting lost in the process. The pace of the class is enough to keep advanced students engaged, while the support by the second instructors is a relief for those who sometimes loose pace.

The course is very complete, and the by the end of the second session, the students have mostly completed the Fire Protocol Game (available at the e-Adventure website). The last day we give the students an empty version of the 1492 game, with all the scenes, characters and conversations, but without any connections or behaviors. That last day is usually fun and engaging. There is no new content (just a review of previously used features) and the students appreciate the rapid progress in the creation of the game (it feels like those books in which children can paste stickers to create their own stories).

Right now Javier and myself are in Puerto Real, having just completed the first day of the course. The participants seem interested and motivated, and rather capable from a technical perspective. I think this is going to be a great course…

<e-Adventure> educational games, game design, teaching

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

We are finishing some stuff related to our new and shiny v1.0 of the <e-Adventure> platform including a brand new website with community forums, sample games, video tutorials and much more. However, we are so proud of it that we couldn’t resist publishing it so that we could hear your opinions, even if the big release with the new website is still scheduled for a few weeks from now.

We have thus uploaded v1.0-RC1 (that is, Release Candidate 1) to the sourceforge repository. This version is fully functional and quite stable, and we would like everyone’s help testing it. Any bugs found in the next few weeks will be fixed for our “proper” 1.0 release, which will happen when we have the website ready and we figure out a couple of known issues.

We really hope you like it. It has taken a lot of effort to arrive to this point, a fact that is amusingly reflected by OHLOH’s metrics. Nearly $1.0M value. I wonder where all that money went …

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects, software engineering

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.

General educational games, game design, media

About two years, while I stayed in Maastricht working at the OUNL ago we started collaborating with Drs. Marc Spaniol and Ralf Klamma from RWTH Aachen. They were doing projects related to interactive storytelling and we were half-way through the first implementation of <e-Adventure>. Since then, our main line of collaboration was the integration of our tools to explore new methodologies to create learning games, as described in this post from the STEG08 Workshop.

One of the most appealing “artifacts” of this initiative was an educational created by our German partners to help Afghan locals understand the procedures involved in archeological work at the Bamiyan Valley Cultural Heritage site. Niels Drobek was one of the main developers for that educational game, which stands as one of the earliests applications of the <e-Adventure> platform in a real setting.

He has put together a video about the game, and it was great to see what they accomplished with such an early version of the platform (it even has the unicorn cursor!). Thank you Niels for your great work.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects, travelling