Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

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

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

We have just finished working on a new release of the <e-Adventure> platform, already available for download on the <e-Adventure> website.

This new version is, in fact, a major release. We have completely redesigned the implementation of the project management process, thus solving all (or most) of the problems related to file saving and the ocasional .EAD file getting corrupted.

We have also included improved editor pages for assessment and adaptation profiles, timed events, timed assessment rules, active areas… It is the result of more than 3 months of work and probably the biggest update to the platform yet.

We would like to encourage all our users to upgrade to the new version (it is backwards compatible) and let us hear your feedback. The next release will focus on usability improvements so, feedback is more important than ever.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

Last summer we were thinking about <e-Adventure> and how its simplicity might be an issue for some student profiles demanding games that were more up to date with their gaming expectations. We wondered whether a fully featured 3D adventure game editor and engine would be as simple to use as the original <e-Adventure> editor.

The conclusion was that it would probably be too hard. An editor capable of helping instructors to develop 3D adventure games would be too complex, and of course not as simple to use as the original editor. However, it was worth a try and so we started developing an experimental 3D version of <e-Adventure>

The work has been mostly carried out by three brilliant developers (Ángel del Blanco, Guillermo Cañizal and Javier Torrente) that decided to prove that it was doable. Their work has surpassed all the intial expectations and their results after one year of work are great. This is how the editor looks like:

The <e-Adventure3D> game platform is now officially a sister project of <e-Adventure>, where we will be exploring educational 3D gaming, bringing the games ten years closer to the current state of the art in entertainment gaming. Note that <e-Adventure3D> does not supercede the original platform. Both projects will continue to grow in parallel, for they serve different purposes and audiences, and represent alternative lines of research.

We belive that, even though it is still under development, we can now proudly announce the <e-Adventure3D> website, where we will be posting updated news about the 3D version of the platform and publish the beta release as soon as it is ready for the great public. Please visit the website and add it to your bookmarks.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects

Last week travelled north to meet the members of the CATEDU, the Aragonese Center for Educational Technologies.

We organized a full-day hands-on course about so that they could get a taste of what is, what can be done with it and establish future plans for collaboration. After a quick morning trip on the AVE (yay!), we arrived in Zaragoza, tired but ready. The experience was very interesting and our hosts simply amazing (they treated us great and planned a wonderful lunch-break for us).

Regarding the main objectives of the visit, I think the results were very satisfying. Even though we could have used some more time, the attendants got a feeling of the platform and managed to create part of a small game during the day (we gave them the art assets and the general storyboard). They learned a lot and seemed happy with the results. Even though the beta versions of the tools displayed some ocasional hiccups, lived up to its promise and I think we could call the course a success. Yes, the tools still have some usability issues, but we are quickly advancing in the correct direction.

However, I did also have an interest in seeing real-life teachers mess with the tools and observe their reactions (OK, they were teachers, but they also work in a center that promotes learning technologies which sort of biases the sample). In that sense, I must confess I was delighted. Walking around the room I could see them interact with the editor, stumble against the bad portions, but also explore beyond the requirements of the course. As the day advanced and they started to get a feeling of the tools, they started enjoying it.

There was something very special in seeing a group of people explore the possibility of creating the type of content that I proselytize, using my platform and having fun. Yes, they paid us to go there, but seeing them enjoy while playing with was so gratifying that I would have paid to go.

After that confession, I just hope they never find this blog.

<e-Adventure> educational games, teaching