Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

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.

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.

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.

In the last few years, the concept of the “Learning Objects Model” has been a keystone in the discussion of web-based learning (and even learning in general). The model suggests that content can be composed as small self-contained units that can then be contained. The perspective is very interesting: If every piece of educational content is created in a self-contained and reusable way, it would be possible to create huge courses simply combining these objects as LEGO bricks.

The model will only work if these pieces of content can be easily identified (in a repository, for example) and can be deployed together in, say, a Learning Managament System. For this reason, there have been huge efforts in the direction of standardizing these procedures. The IMS Content Packaging specification defines how we should distribute these Learning Objects so that they can be deployed in different platforms without an adaptation effort. When it comes to “discovering” these Learning Objects in a repository, we need standardized metadata (like IEEE LOM or DublinCore) that allows us to search in these repositories and quickly decide if the LO is suitable for our needs. Some higher-level initiatives combine different standards and propose a generic model for the deployment of online materials (ADL SCORM would be the most relevant example).

The model, as most things, has faithful believers and angry opponents. Personally, I haven’t decided yet. I do believe that the idea of resuing educational content is good (it sort of works in programming) but tend to reject the concept of standardized content. Without standard students, standard content seems like a bad idea. This is one of the reasons why I think game-based learning is good and adaptive game-based learning is great.

However, I also believe that the current e-learning infrastructure can be leveraged as a deployment method. E-Learning parcipants (developers, instructors and students) are more open to new ideas than the traditional school participants. Besides, most schools and universities are shifting towards a blended learning (b-learning) approach that combines traditional classes with e-learning technologies. A teacher from an online training environment, a school or a university can use an e-learning platform to send the games to the students so that they can play with them at home.

Putting both ideas together, my idea was that we could encapsulate the games as standards-compliant Learning Objects so that they can deployed by a teacher in (mostly) any Learning Management System and played by the students at home. Additionally, if the games are labelled with standardized metadata, they can be stored and discovered in content repositories, which seems like a good a idea in itself.

We are trying to support and test this idea with the <e-Adventure> platform. Thanks to the programming talent displayed by Javier Torrente, from version 0.3 <e-Adventure> supports tagging the games with IEEE LOM metadata and then exporting them as IMS packages. We will soon be publishing a detailed report on our experiences, which include successful deployment of the games in platforms such as WebCT and Moodle, and easy inclusion of the games in bigger modules using the Reload Editor.

In the meantime, why don’t you try for yourself? Download the new version, export your game as a Learning Object and try to deploy it in your LMS of choice. We will be waiting for your kind feedback.

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)

The <e-Adventure> project was developed as a prototype for my thesis work. It was born as a development process model for educational adventure games, but eventually the tools developed as support for the process model have grown into fully functional products.

We have recently released both the <e-Adventure> editor and the <e-Adventure> engine for everyone to use. Leaving aside the development process model for large teams originally devised, these tools can be used by anyone interested in creating adventure games to create their own adventures without any programming knowledge. In this sense, this tool is trying to compete against initiatives such as the Wintermute Engine or the Adventure Game Studio.

Even if <e-Adventure> is not as mature as those tools, it offers some cool aspects worth checking out. To begin with, the games are stored as human-readable XML documents. This improves the maintainability and allows anyone, even without the editor, to tweak minor aspects of the gam. Additionally, it includes pedagogical features such as an internal assessment and game adaptation to suit learning styles. These mechanisms can actually be controlled from a Learning Management System, enabling online educational processes in which the games are deployed from the server as part of a course, enrichening the learning experience. For example, the games can include interactive exams and the grade can be automatically stored in the server.

I would like to invite my readers to test drive our current release (v0.2) and let us know your first impressions (write us at e-adventure#e-ucm.es) . We are still behind our competitors, but plan on catching up really soon.

Aww, crap, I did it again… Once more I have managed to neglect my blog for more than two months. Quite a feat, indeed.

For the comeback, I will be completing the post that I left uncompleted about four months ago. In the post Integrating games and e-learning (pt. 1) I discussed Aldrich’s six stages for new technologies and ideas, concluding that educational videogames were slowly entering a critical phase where public awareness and the expectations generated by the media put a pressure on any future game-based learning initiative.

As I stated in that post, the value of games as an educational tool is barely disputed in the academic field. The debate has moved on to discuss if they are cost-effective (is there a real ROI if you spend a million dollars in an educational product?) and how we can introduce educational videogames and game-like simulations in the current educational system without disconnecting them from the rest of the curriculum. The post ended with the open question of how to overcome those issues, which is the topic of my thesis.

I would like to focus this discussion on the second issue, the integration of the games with the rest of the educational process. A typical target for educational gaming is K-12 education. Often this is because we consider that only children play games. This is an idea that I strongly dispute, but that’s not the point of this post. Taking a step back from the concept of regulated schools, other environments may be willing to use game-based learning approaches. In particular, the e-learning arena is currently evolving to meet the challenge of improving the quality of the learning experiences and compensating the consequences of the separation from the instructor (e.g. lack of motivation, the inability to detect students that require additional support, etc.). This has caused e-learning technologies to move beyond the concept of mere static-content repositories, becoming complex environments that manage learning experiences, allowing the interaction between instructors and students, giving the instructor the ability to monitor student progress, and offering complex interaction mechanisms that improve the learning experiences: They are the so-called Learning Management Systems (LMS).

The field is ripe for the introduction of game-based learning. LMS vendors are constantly reinventing the concept trying to explore new alternatives that may give them a competitive advantage. In addition, focusing our efforts on the introduction of educational videogames in these environments allows us to leverage the existing technological infrastructure and facilitates the the integration of the games with the rest of activities in the instructional design.

Additionally, even though these e-learning systems were born as an alternative to traditional (schooled) learning, they are currently being used to enrich and complement those traditional models in what has been branded the b-learning approach (as in blended learning). I consider that the integration with modern e-learning environments can be a base on which to build an educational model that combines all the elements previously identified: The role of the instructor, the importance of rich instructional designs, the use of traditional contents, and leveraging the benefits of educational videogames. Additionally, given the current trend towards the adoption of b-learning approaches, the benefits can have an impact on both online learning environments and traditional environments willing to embrace blended approaches.

In the development of the <e-Adventure> platform, we always had LMS platforms in mind. The engine can be deployed as a Java Applet through any web system, just like any other kind of web content. The problem is, if we simply do that, we only get the advantages of any other kind of web content. Games can be dynamically adapted, they can generate traces of the activity of the student and even perform automatic assessment. Those are all desirable features in online learning, and all that we need is to connect the games with the LMS (and thus with the rest of the learning experience). That’s the reason why the <e-Adventure> platform includes an API that enables the communication between <e-Adventure> games and LMS platforms, as well as a reference implementation of the API on both the client and the server sides.

When the games are deployed through a compliant LMS (in our current state, that means an LMS that follows the IMS Learning Design specification), they establish a communication link through this API, and use this channel to exchange adaptation and assessment information with the LMS.

We are only beginning to explore the possibilities of this integration and the learning patterns that emerge. For more information about this integration and its educational possibilities, I recommed reading our paper Adaptive Units of Learning and Educational Videogames, recently published in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.

The pressure of completing my thesis in time made me miss the self-imposed weekly deadline to write here that I was proudly accomplishing until this weekend. As a quick fix, here’s an excerpt of the motivation of my research, stolen from the introduction to my thesis.

In his book Learning by Doing, Aldrich states that every new technology undergoes a 6-stage cycle from its inception until it becomes a established feature of our daily lives. The cycle starts at the Theory stage, when the academic world starts discussing an idea that may suppose a change or an advancement. When innovators start pushing the first pilots, the idea becomes an Innovation.

If these first developments are successful and show potential, the expectation grows and both marketing divisions and the media start making promises about the future of the technology. Then, institutions and corporations assume this may be the “next big thing”: it’s the Magic Bullet stage and, driven by the hype, vast amounts of money and resources are invested in exploring further. But as more solutions are tested, the results do not always live up to the expectations. The idea suddenly does not look so interesting and the Confusion stage starts.

The next step, which Aldrich names Strategic Advantage is the second, more refined implementation the idea, tackling the issues that generated the previous crisis and providing real value to adopters. After that stage, the new technology eventually becomes Infrastructure.

The idea of using games or videogames as learning tools has been around for some time. It’s origins trace back to seminal works by Malone on the 80s and the major contributions by Leutner, Porter, Lepper, Cordova, Rieber and many many others.

In the last few years, the exponential increase in the technology and complexity of modern videogames has turned them into one of the biggest entertainment industries. Meanwhile, the idea of using games for education has gained momentum in these first years of the 21st Century. New scholars (Prensky, Garris, Gee, Squire, Jekins…) have pushed the idea and successfully argued that videogames contain precisely the elements required to improve the learning experiences in order to match the requirements of the Information Society. The work of these authors has finally made an impact and, in the last 5 years, the use of videogames and game-like simulations in educational environments has moved on from the academic Theory stage towards the Innovation stage with the development of several initiatives and pilots. And then quoting Van Eck in 2006:

After years of research and proselytizing, the proponents of digital game-based learning (DGBL) have been caught unaware. Like the person who is still yelling after the sudden cessation of loud music at a party, DGBL proponents have been shouting to be heard above the prejudice against games. But now, unexpectedly, we have everyone’s attention.

This sudden attention marks the transition to the Magic Bullet stage which often leads to the corresponding Confusion stage. That critical stage has already started. Even though the initial pilots hint a great potential and learning benefits, it has not been possible to quantify such benefits precisely and this lack of evidence, bringing back the images of the principle and fueling a new critical debate.

The academic debate has thus moved on to new grounds. One of the key questions now is, assuming that videogames provide a quality learning experience, is this experience significant enough so as to justify its enormous cost when compared to traditional contents? This question, by now, lacks a broadly accepted answer.

Another critique often heard is that merely interacting with an educational game does not guarantee that the student learns the lessons, and that games should be a part of more bigger educational models. How can we introduce educational videogames and game-like simulations in the current educational system without disconnecting them from the rest of the curriculum? Changes in the educational system are always introduced with caution. Given the stakes, it is not feasible to overhaul the educational system due to unaffordable costs and a lack of absolute guarantees of a risk-free transition.

Therefore, if the idea is to become a common element in our learning experiences, we need ways to overcome the current Confusion stage and refine the successful elements of the current approaches, eliminate the bad approaches and eventually move on to the Strategic Advantage stage.

How can we achieve this? Some suggestions next week…

James Paul Gee is an author that has written several essays and books around the concept that games exhibit the purest forms of learning. Not the usual statement that “games could be used for learning”, but a subtler yet absolutely true concept: games are really complex applications and yet, players, learn to play them. Without ever reading the manual. And with a very low tolerance towards studying and learning (after all, they just invested 60$ in a game). Modern games, out of neccessity, have developed in-game tutorials and other learning mechanisms that allow the players to learn the game mechanics as they play, as opposed to first teaching them how to control the game and then starting play. Those games unable to provide successful learning experiences resulted in a failure. Game players don’t offer second chances. They expect to be having fun shortly after launching the game, and boring lessons are out of the question.

Good Videogames + Good Learning is a compilation of essays by James Paul Gee on the topic. I recently purchased a number of books that I did need, but this one was not one of my objectives. However, Amazon returned it as part of the “related books” function, and I simply couldn’t help buying it. Why the impulse?

Well, here is a deep secret. In 2003 I was passionate about games in general and mildly interested in serious games and in the concept of learning while playing. Out of that curiosity, I ordered a book by J.P. Gee. It was called “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy“. The book, as the rest of his writings, was not explicitly about learning with educational games, but about the learning that takes place in comercial games. For me, I admit, reading that book was a life-changing event. I read the entire book in one day, finishing late at night and then pondering about it until even later. Next morning, thinking in the shower (my favourite place for deep thoughts), it dawned on me: I had found the field on which I wanted to base my research. Or, with a special wink to a specific reader of this blog (as if there were many), I had found the shirt on which I would eventually find a spot to clean.

That summer I would graduate and, up to that morning, I was thinking whether to pursue an academic career or try my luck as a developer in the videogame industry. After reading that book, I decided to stay in the university, and try to get a PhD working on this field. As life-changing as it gets.

Among all the books I purchased, Good Videogames + Good Learning may not be the one I needed most for my research, but I have devoured it almost as quickly as the other one, and again loved it. Unfortunately, this time it hasn’t changed my life in a noticeable way (yet), but it is a remarkable read that I recommend. Personally, it has reminded me why I believe in this field and I will actually try to squeeze some time out of my current stay in Portugal to write a couple of posts about this topic.

Well, it seems that IBM is back to the blog and again it is because they do the right thing. During IMPACT 2007 (a conference targeted for IBM customers) IBM showcased a demo of the Innov8 game-like environment. Yes, a top world-wide company showing games in front of 4000 corporate clients.

What is Innov8 and why is it important? According to the IBM press release:

A BPM Simulator, an interactive, 3-D educational game simulator designed to bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders in an organization. (…) The game, which can be played with a joystick, is based on Web 2.0 technology and allows players to visualize how an SOA impacts different parts of the organization. Together, users can literally see business processes, identify bottlenecks, and explore ‘what if’ scenarios before SOA is deployed.

(How many buzzwords can you fit into one single paragraph?) Behind the corporate jargon, Innov8 simulates an enrichened work environment. They think it’s nice because you can visualize the impact of SOA in your organization. I think it’s awesome because it’s a great playground for employees. When you see the video of the game, it looks like a proper (cubicled) work environment, with its lobby, offices, coffee machine, employees hanging around, etc. Why only use it to think about SOA? Of course understanding the impact of key technologies is important but, how about understanding the inner workings of your workplace?

Here’s my vision: The entire IBM Headquarters modelled as a 3D environment. And you can download it and walk around it using your computer. Would that be useful? Of course! Such an environment could be used to make new employees familiar with their future work environment. Where’s the cafeteria? Where are the copying machines? Where’s the office of the person I have to report to? Where can I find the office of employee X?

Does that sound trivial? Let’s try some more questions: What should I do in the event of a fire? Where is the closest emergency-exit from my cubicle? And how do I exit the building if I’m not in my usual desk? Are there any areas of the building that require special safety equipment? How is it to move around the building in a wheel-chair? (the last question is inspired by a real IBM case in their theoretically disabled-friendly new building in Madrid. The first time the wheel-chair ramp at the main entrance was needed… noone knew where it was!)

Anyhow, the idea I’m trying to convey is that management tends to overlook the importance of learning about the work environment itself. No matter how much management sees employees as resources (tools?) that produce benefits, the employees are, in fact, human beings and they interact with the environment. They need the business knowledge to be functional employees, but they also need the environmental knowledge to be functional human beings. And as proof, here’s a screenshot of the non-public wiki currently being used by the Department of Medicine at MGH

That wiki captures the rich knowledge of the department, but the second most popular page in it is the lunch schedule. Unlike computers, employees eat.