Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

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.

General reflections, teaching

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

2008 has been a very interesting year for me. In 2007 I got my PhD degree and 2008 was an unkown. Would my life be empty after the PhD? Would I get a shot at a position in my University? Would I be able to continue working on <e-Adventure>? Would new research projects open before me? Or maybe I would simply become complacent and let a futile year go by?

Well, these are some of the highlights from the year:

• We accelerated a lot in the development of the <e-Adventure> platform, thanks at first to the involvement of Javier Torrente, and then with the support of the FLEXO project
• We have imparted three courses about the use of <e-Adventure> for teachers, educational technologists and professional content developers.
• We did some field tests with <e-Adventure> games, creating a game for medicine students and testing it with 65 students (still working on the results…)
• I signed a four year teaching contract with my department and started teaching full-time at my university
• We started a new line of research on using mobile game consoles (Nintendo DS in particular) to develop educational games
• We completed the first development of the <e-Adventure3D> platform, as described in this post
• We started working on a mobile version of the <e-Adventure> platform
• I participated in 14 research publications (including journals, conferences and workshops), with two conference papers receiving the Best Paper Award (ICWL 2008 and GDTW 2008)
• I attended four conferences (ICALT 2008, STEG 2008, DIGITEL 2008 and ACE 2008)

Not too complacent, huh? The bad part is that now I’m not sure if I will manage to pull another year like this one… I’ll tell you next year!

General conferences, projects, teaching

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

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