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.

In what has now become an established tradition, we will be running a seminar on game design for e-learning environments for students of the School of Computer Engineering at Complutense University.

This is our ad for this year’s seminar:

This will be our fourth edition, and we will use the same approach as previous years: The first two weeks, we (the coordinators) will do most of the talking, presenting our ideas and experiences on educational game design. After that, the students get the spotlight and propose their own ideas.

The following 7 weeks the students form groups and each group develops an educational game with complete freedom to decide their topic, genre, design, contents and technology. Of course we always suggest using e-Adventure, but we never enforce it. Many of the most successful projects produced in these seminars have been e-Adventure games, but last year’s winner was, in fact, created with RPGMaker.

Did I say winner? Yes, the seminar output is not a quantitative grade (only pass/fail), but the last day we do hold a public presentation party and let the students vote which is the best game.

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.

I have already mentioned briefly that we have been working with our colleagues in the Department of Physiology at UCM’s Medical School. This collaboration goes back to around 3 years ago, when I met Lola Comas and Carmen Fernández Galaz at a focus group in the School of Education.

We spoke briefly about <e-Adventure>, the kind of games and simulations that could be created and we decide to meet later to discuss potential collaborations. In the end, we decided to create a brief simulation to rehearse the steps of a practical exercise in which the students have to measure Hematocrit levels in a blood sample. This practical exercise is performed once in the course, using blood samples from sacrificed laboratory rats. For this reason, students are not allowed to recreate the exercise out of the scheduled session.

The key idea of developing a simulation game covering the steps of the exercise is that students would be able to practice the exercise at their own pace before going to the lab, thus becoming familiar with the steps of the procedure and later on getting more profit out of the time-limited lab experience. In addition, the students would later be able to practice the virtual version of the exercise before the exam to refresh the procedure. The result is what we call the HTC game, a virtual practical exercise developed with <e-Adventure> using photographs of the actual workbench at the lab, and that can be directly deployed through the Virtual Campus at Complutense Unversity.

The results of the experience have been very interesting. We conducted an experiment separating the students into an Experimental and a Control Group, letting the former play a few days before the actual session and sending the latter directly to the lab. The students in the EC found the practical exercise easier, demonstrated a better grasp on the concept and even made fewer mistakes.

All in all, a great success that we reported an article submitted to the International Journal of Medical Informatics, which published the final version recently. Here is the full citation:

Pablo Moreno-Ger, Javier Torrente, Julián Bustamante, Carmen Fernández-Galaz, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, María Dolores Comas-Rengifo: Application of a low-cost web-based simulation to improve students’ practical skills in medical education. Int. J. Med. Inform. Vol 79, pp. 459-467, (2010)

The article includes a link to download the game, which can also be found (in English and Spanish) in the <e-Adventure> website. In addition, if you don’t have access to IJMI, our self-archived copy of the draft is also available at the <e-UCM> website repository.

e-Adventure was born with the objective of reducing the barriers for game-based learning adoption. As such, it was a platform that attempted to make it simpler for small development teams, or even individual instructors, to create their own educational adventure games without any programming knowledge.

Five years later, I believe we have been successful, and I’m proud of how e-Adventure is maturing as an open platform, at a rate of 300 monthly downloads, and with new features and usability features added on every release.

In the past three years we have been organizing courses at different Spanish education institutions, such as universities or high schools, with one clear objective: To teach teachers how to teach with e-Adventure.

So far the reception has been great. Teachers like the courses, enjoy using the platform and always give us back positive and valuable feedback.

The organization is simple: For two entire days (or three days with half-day sessions) we walk the participants through the constructions of a complete game using the e-Adventure platform. We usually start with a short motivation and context lecture, and then one of my colleagues (usually Javier or Ángel) go step by step through the construction of the game, while I walk among the participants bringing anyone who lags behind up to speed. This method works great, as it allows us to impose a reasonably high pace without being concerned (or interrupted) by people getting lost in the process. The pace of the class is enough to keep advanced students engaged, while the support by the second instructors is a relief for those who sometimes loose pace.

The course is very complete, and the by the end of the second session, the students have mostly completed the Fire Protocol Game (available at the e-Adventure website). The last day we give the students an empty version of the 1492 game, with all the scenes, characters and conversations, but without any connections or behaviors. That last day is usually fun and engaging. There is no new content (just a review of previously used features) and the students appreciate the rapid progress in the creation of the game (it feels like those books in which children can paste stickers to create their own stories).

Right now Javier and myself are in Puerto Real, having just completed the first day of the course. The participants seem interested and motivated, and rather capable from a technical perspective. I think this is going to be a great course…

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.

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 students 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 prototypical 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 typical 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.

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!

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.

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.