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

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

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

Every research project comes to a stage in which the research is finished, and you have a working prototype that proves your ideas. This stage is one of the most critical points in the life-cycle. Once you reach there, the project is not that interesting from a research perspective, which means it is more difficult to find funding to keep working on it so that it becomes a production-ready tool.

<e-Adventure>, as a prototype for my PhD. work, entered that stage a few months ago. However, thanks to the FLEXO project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, the future of the platform is brighter than ever. The project is about the development of adaptive learning platforms, and one of the work packages deals with adaptive gaming. <e-Adventure> will be the core of that work package.

We have thus hired three new programmers to work on the platform, which means an important increase of our work capacity. For the duration of the FLEXO project, we will try to push the platform as far as possible, including a complete redesign of the adaptation module (of course), lots of new features and a lot of usability improvements.

Stay tuned for the next few releases driving towards our 1.0 milestone (0.8 before Christmas, 0.9 in February and 1.0 in Spring).

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

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

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.

<e-Adventure> articles, e-learning, educational games