Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

In my classes, I always try to keep track of those students that come to the recitations well-prepared, and that participate actively in class. While participation has never been part of the grade, I have traditionally used that information whenever I come across a border-line grade: Is this an A or a B? In addition, since only 1 in 20 students can get the A+ grade, I also use my participation records to decide which students gets the A+ in case of a tie, as I may find that I have 5 students with a 10/10 in the exam but can only award three A+ grades.

This year, I am teaching a Programming Fundamentals course for the new ECTS-compliant program in computer science, in which 10% of the grade is explicitly assigned to evaluate participation in class and contribution in optional tasks. I thus wanted to keep track of those students that completed different exercises and tasks throughout the course. I have typically done this by writing down the names of those students that deserve recognition, and keep a track of what we usually call “positives” in the school slang.

However, this year the students are split into groups for the recitations, and we have planned lessons in which all the students have to try to complete an exercise in class. Tracking “positives” was bound to be cumbersome, and I actually hate the term. I needed something different.

I have thus set up an experiment with my students. I have generated a set of 9-digit codes and printed them in small pieces of paper that we bring to the recitations in the lab. And instead of writing down the names of the students that do well, we give them one of these tokens with a code. By the end of the course, I will be asking the students to send back to me a list of the codes they have gathered. I will then crib out duplicated or forged codes (I have the means to verify them) and use this information to adjust their grades.

So, how is this different from writing down their names? The process is actually more cumbersome, and can be gamed by the students to some extent. Why bother then?

Well, I believe that it is working out because now the students are made responsible for tracking their participation. The physical token, although simple, still makes a deeper impact that simply seeing me write down a name, just like casino chips are more appealing than digital money in a digital casino. Moreover, in some of the sessions there is a chance of walking out with a handful of codes, and ending up with a small stack of tokens at home. The students can compare and compete, something that was not possible through traditional means.

I believe that this is more interesting than the typical approach and the students (at least some of them) are responding well. Some other teachers have mentioned that this is akin to treating them like children, but this I hear this so often whenever I try to gamify any process that I really don’t care as long as it works.

And some of the students are beginning to understand and leverage the trick to walk out with a stack of tokens: to study the subject matter and try to solve the exercises before coming to the lab. Precisely.

For anyone thinking that I had actually taken a two-month vacation, I wish you were right. It’s been a hectic return from vacation, with trips, exams and setting up a new course. We are starting our classes next week, and I am both thrilled and a bit overwhelmed with this exciting new course.

This year I’m going to be teaching a brand new course in Programming Fundamentals that marks the start of Bologna-compliant grades in our school. We are changing mostly everything about how we teach this subject, adopting a model that favors day-to-day work rather than a single high-stakes final exam. In theory, this should be better for the students. Studying in small amounts, having smaller groups and having numerous evaluations and reviewed practical exercises sound like good learning principles.

However, how this will work in practice is an unknown. The average student here simply does not go to class. Last year, in one of my groups with 71 enrolled students, the average attendance at the beginning of the semester was 18, a number that dropped to 9 by the last month. This suggests that schedule compatibility and the model based in a single exam seriously affected attendance. On the other hand, only one of the students with over 90% attendance throughout the course ended up failing the exam. Does this suggest that day-to-day attendance and work facilitate passing? Most likely, although this could also be a mere correlation: good students that would pass anyway tend to attend lectures.

What will happen now? Will students maintain low attendance ratios and try to pass with the minimum compulsory attendance (their top potential grade would be capped at 60%)? Will students actually focus, attend lectures and pass more easily? Will we have students attending but failing? Even if it is a lot more work, I am happy to be involved in this new course experience. This is change in how we teach. Not a dramatic change, but a change nonetheless. And if we do it right, we will demonstrate that university teaching and learning can change after all.

August is finally here, and it was about time I had a vacation!

Last year I was in Boston and that pretty much prevented me from taking a proper long vacation. Although I will not disconnect entirely, this year I’m planning to take the month easy and get some rest, preparing for a very intense start of the course in September (both professionally and personally).

This means that I will not be posting (and probably not tweeting) again until September. In anticipation of this blank period, just a quick reflection on the experiment about increasing my posting rate. Early June I decided to try to publish around a post per week and a tweet per day. That post was 8 weeks ago (and 38 work-days ago). Counting the experiment post and this specific one, I have published 9 posts since then (and 39 tweets).

As I said, I don’t mind whether any of the posts was relevant or any the tweets was read by anyone. the good news is that it seems like I can keep the pace. Let’s just hope I don’t loose the habit after the summer break.

In any case, for anyone reading, have a nice summer and see you in September!

Yes, with a 7-month delay. In January 2009 I published a post summarizing my research activity in 2008. It ended with a question to myself: Would I be able to pull out another year as intense as 2008?

Well, let’s see…

• The growth of the <e-Adventure> platform continued at an even higher pace. The incorporation of brilliant programmers like Eugenio or Ángel (and Javier, who had already been working with the platform) accelerated our development speed. We published version 0.9 with a ton of changes and then finally 1.0. During the year we reached an average of 150 downloads per month (with more than 300 in November and December).
• After some key publications, <e-Adventure> was well very well received by the local media and we were interviewed a few times.
• I completed my first year of full-teaching duties, and used it to play some educational games in the classroom and to promote game programming among my students.
• We finished a first iteration porting the <e-Adventure> engine to Java-based mobile devices, and started a second iteration focusing on the Android platform.
• We collaborated a lot with the school of medicine at UCM, creating educational simulations with <e-Adventure> to complement practical exercises, performing tests with students and publishing the results. Summary: Playing provided a better understanding of the practical exercises and better grades.
• We opened new lines of research within <e-Adventure>, focusing on accessibility, new game-writing methodologies and new software and plugins for version 2.0 (more on this on a later post).
• I went to the Lab of Computer Science in Boston again. This time I went there for six months thanks to a grant from Real Colegio Complutense. I worked with Carl in new types of game-based learning, including a rather interesting game about how to properly package hazardous materials for shipping.
• I participated in 14 research publications (including journals, conferences and workshops)
• I attended only one conference: MatDidac 2010. I was invited to give one of the keynote sessions.
• Most importantly: I secured a tenured Associate Professor position at Complutense University.

Again, a pretty intense year. 2010 is also looking good so far, with my tenured position and increasing involvement in different projects. The diversification of e-Adventure as a test-bed for different lines of research is exciting and seems to be yielding interesting results.

I will let you know once the year finishes. I just hope I will remember to do my yearly report in January this time.

Dear blog,

It has (again) been months between posts, and in these months I have been thinking about blogging, tweeting, facebooking and other forms of online presence.

I am registered in most web-based social forms of communication, but I am not really committed to any of them, all for different reasons.

For instance, I started this blog as a way of putting my research on the web, giving it some exposure, and keeping a log of our research activities (mostly focused on the e-Adventure project). However, maintaining this blog has a curious psychological effect: even though I do not have a lot of readers, I do feel a pressure to write witty and interesting posts. Unfortunately, I rarely find the time (or the mood) to write elaborate posts, and as soon as my workload increases, I leave the blog unattended for months.

I also write in another blog, in which we share stories of all flavors, usually with a geeky perspective. Write? Wrote. My last post there was more than a year ago.

On the other hand, there is twitter. I opened my twitter account a few months ago, because it is another important form of online presence and because I was interested in following twitter content. I do follow a lot of interesting sources of tweets from friends, researchers and media, but I rarely contribute content.

The case with twitter is different: it is not that I do not have the time (140 chars!). The point is that when I do something interesting, it just doesn’t occur to me to tweet about it.

So, if I were to maintain an online presence to expose my research activities, I should develop a tweeting habit and find the time and energy to post on the blog. Or I could just quit both activities, and focus on my articles and classes, which are the activities that they actually pay me to do.

I have been thinking about those two options. Archiving the blog and forgetting about twitter is obviously easier, and will give me more time and less pressure for my other activities. On the other hand, I think I could have fun maintaining an online presence if I could reduce self-imposed pressure.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to do a little experiment on myself. I’m going to try to commit to at least one blog post per week and a tweet per day. I’m going to pretend that no one reads them (let’s be honest, few people actually read them) and just focus on getting the posts and tweets published, without a pressure for quality.

Once I slip back into one of these non-writing lapses (it will happen), I will check back and try to reflect on whether I’m happy with what I posted and rethink what it means to maintain an online presence.

After completing a 4-month process in mid-october and nearly another month of paperwork, my promotion to Associate Professor is now complete. More specifically, I am now a “Profesor Contratado Doctor” and it is a tenured, non-civil servant position, with teaching and research duties.

Obviously, this promotion means a lot for me. After many years in which I have sustained myself through short-term grants and temporary contracts as a lecturer, this is a great change. It is the confirmation that I can devote the rest of my life to research and teaching, which are my real passions (in fact, my main research area is actually education). From this foundation, I now have the freedom to pursue new projects and ambitious objectives without being constrained by short-term requirements. It is a dream that has come true. This is what I wanted to do in my life, and having this work secured for life seems like the most significant step in my career so far.

My only regret is that this had to be achieved through a competitive process against some colleagues and friends from my department. I really wish them the best luck in the future so that they can also feel this relief.

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.

After summarizing 3 years of work in a 50-minute presentation  and 60 minutes of questioning , everything ended in victory and celebration. I got the highest possible grade and some very nice words from the members of the committee. The dissertation, entitled “A Documental Approach to the Creation and Integration of Educational Videogames in Virtual Learning Environments”, basically includes all the work around <e-Adventure> during the last years.

Although the document includes a thorough list of academic acknowledgements (along with some personal ones), people tend not to read them. Thus, I thought I would at least send a greeting to the people that stayed around me while creating this work and knowingly or unknowingly participated in this. And I will use this blog for that (which, ironically, people tend not to read either).

Looking at my publications it’s obvious that my advisor Baltasar and my colleagues José Luis and Iván have worked as much as myself in this project. It is not all that obvious that a lot of the implementation work was done by my wonderful students Bruno, Francisco and Eduardo. They are now starting their professional careers and my best wishes are with them.

Also, I have travelled around the world during this project. 9 months out of 16 living abroad, which took a huge personal toll but at the same time allowed me to meet some wonderful people that compensated all the loneliness of travelling.

In Boston I stayed twice at the LCS. My host, Carl, along with Henry and Cathy made my stay possible. There, I worked with a lot of very interesting people, like Dave, Caroline or Paul. I also met wonderful friends such as Katie, Mark, Netta, Ishir, Mike, Ana or Liz; they all made me feel welcome and at home in Boston. So did my “family” in Boston, Michael and John. Others, such as Greg or Bill made a deep impression (on personal and professional levels) that they are probably unaware of.

In the grey and cold Netherlands I was hosted by Daniel and I also met Gemma. They were both friendly and welcoming when I needed it most. In Coimbra I was hosted by Toze, and the trip allowed me to meet Marta, Paola and Gema. Back in Madrid, people such as my family and Raquel were missing me. It was probably unpleasant for them, but there is a part of me that appreciates being missed.

In the end it was worth the effort, and I’m happy to publish in this blog the two most important documents I have generated so far:  My dissertation and the slides from the defence.

Dear thesis:

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here in Portugal. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually a scientific work.

Every scientific work on this planet is the result of a natural equilibrium between creativity, a relaxed and open-minded attitude, and the natural talent of scientific researchers, but you theses are not. When I should be working on you, procrastinating habits appear and multiply and multiply until every time resource is consumed… and the only way I can actually work on you is to ingest vast amounts of caffeine and spread the work to the wee hours of the night.

There is another type of work that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A Program. PhD theses are a form of source code, another by-product of caffeine. You’re a program and I am a programmer.

Let’s get back to work.

Randy Pausch is a key academic figure in the fields of Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality and Serious Gaming.

As a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he created the amazing Building Virtual Worlds course, a reference in the field. He co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at CMU, which is also a reference as far as serious games are related (not as much in the “games-can-teach flavour” but in the “games-are-art flavour”).

But the first time I came to hear his name was actually as the mind behind Alice, a tool that facilitates the creation of 3D animations and environments, lowering the access barriers to learning java programming, object orientation and 3D programming.

On Tuesday, Prof. Pausch delivered an amazing lecture at CMU, in a cycle that used to be called “Last Lectures” (now, Journeys) in which CMU asks their star professors to give the lectures they would like to be remembered for. It was an amazing lecture about life, the relations with others, and an overview of an entire lifetime.

It also drags a huge emotional background due to Pausch’s fatal medical condition. However, just as he does during the lecture, I only wanted to mention that point but not make it central to the discussion. The lecture is amazing by itself and I really recommend investing two hours of your life in listening to the story of his life.

Lecture in streaming video

Note that the lecture itself does not address any academic issues. For that reason, I was doubting whether to post it here. But this morning I realized that listening to this lecture has been the most important thing that has happened to me during the entire week. From that perspective, I actually couldn’t post about anything else.