Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

As I said a few days ago, I have now returned from the 10º Congreso Internacional y 13º Nacional de Material Didáctico Innovador (International Conference on Innovative Educational Materials). My presentation was well-received by most of the audience, and I later got very valuable feedback from researchers in different fields.

The conference once started as a small gathering of researchers, mostly related to the field of Medicine. However, for the last 13 editions (yes! 13!) it has grown into a much bigger event, with high impact work and reputable presenters (and then me ). The organizers also treated me wonderfully, with a big display of effort and hospitality.

All in all, my visit to Mexico was a pleasure and I really hope I will be able to come back.

Some people asked for the slides of my presentation during the conference, so I have just uploaded them to SlideShare for anyone who wants to check them. You can find them here.

Research conferences, e-learning, educational games, travelling

I have been invited by the organizers of the 10º Congreso Internacional y 13º Nacional de Material Didáctico Innovador (International Conference on Innovative Educational Materials) to visit Mexico City next week.

There I will deliver a lecture about game-based learning. I am expecting a mixed audience on the topic of GBL: Supporters, detractors and just oblivious. Thus, I will start with a short pitch on the (potential) benefits about game-based learning. However, my intention goes beyond merely proselytizing.

In the last few years conducting GBL research, we have met more barriers than actual opportunities. In this talk I also try to raise awareness on the fact that GBL, no matter how exciting, is still an emerging trend with little solid facts about their power as educational tools. Society is not really ready for games, which are still considered as an industry that only targets male kids (and actually, only targets them in order to turn them into psychopaths). In addition, digital games can be disruptive in a classroom and will certainly meet more opposition than support from teachers. I will try to review these potential issues and give some ideas about how to tackle these problems, including our own research.

I hope I will be able to provoke a reaction on the audience, reducing the opposition or detractors, challenging supporters to think about new research questions and, most of all, sparking new ideas in the mind of those oblivious to games as an educational medium.

I will let you know whether I succeeded in a couple of weeks (or in three months, given my blogging habits).

Research conferences, educational games, game design, travelling

It’s been ages since I last posted something. Time constraints this year are being worse than ever and I hardly find the time to write (interesting) things. Just to remind everyone (including me) that I still maintain this blog, I wanted to give a brief overview of the current state of the <e-Adventure> family of platforms.

Yes, I said family.

I am assuming that readers of this blog are already familiar with the <e-Adventure> platform. Almost one year ago, I introduced in this blog the <e-Adventure3D> platform, a 3D version of the same approach to educational gaming. During the last year, we have also been working on a mobile version designed to work in mobile phones, with the idea that it would be possible to create a 2D adventure game using the <e-Adventure> editor and then “export” it suiting different mobile devices.

We have been busy in the last few months promoting this family of platforms all around the world. First, I presented a very early prototype of the mobile platform (<m-Adventure>) at the DIGITEL 2008 conference in Banff, Canada (and I wrote about it).

Then, I went to Japan to present for the first time our <e-Adventure3D> platform in an academic event, the ACM Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE 2008). The presentation was very successful, mostly because the platform is really cool. I really hope we can push this development further. This is the full citation (remember that you can always find all our publications at the <e-UCM> website):

Javier Torrente, Guillermo Cañizal, Ángel del Blanco, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008): < e-Adventure3D>: An Open Source Authoring Environment for 3D Adventure Games in Education. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2008). December 2008, Yokohama, Japan.

Only a few weeks ago, Pablo Lavín went to Jordan to present a newer, much improved version of <m-Adventure>, where he spoke about our flexible architecture designed to support multiple exportation profiles at the IMCL 2009 conference. This is the citation:

Pablo Lavín-Mera, Javier Torrente, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2009): Mobile Game Development for Multiple Devices in Education. In proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Mobile and Computer-Aided Learning (IMCL 2009), Amman, Jordan.

At the core of all these products, is the notion of using a Learning Management System as a central point in game-based learning activities. Javier Torrente recently traveled to Liverpool to present our work in how to coordinate heterogeneous game platforms (including <e-Adventure>) using a Learning Management System as a persistence layer. The presentation was very succesful and received the Best Paper Award from the Programme Committee at the GDTW 2008 conference. This is the full citation:

Javier Torrente, Pablo Lavín-Mera, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2008).  Coordinating Heterogeneous Game-based Learning Approaches in Online Learning Environments. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Game Design and Technology Workshop and Conference (GDTW2008), pages 27-36. Liverpool, UK.

As you may see, in spite of the long silences in this blog, our research line is more active than ever. We are being pleasantly successful with our products and really anxious to see how far we can go. And soon you will all get a glimpse of our recent progress. Stay tuned for the inminent release of <e-Adventure> 1.0, which right now looks awesome.

<e-Adventure> articles, conferences, travelling

About two years, while I stayed in Maastricht working at the OUNL ago we started collaborating with Drs. Marc Spaniol and Ralf Klamma from RWTH Aachen. They were doing projects related to interactive storytelling and we were half-way through the first implementation of <e-Adventure>. Since then, our main line of collaboration was the integration of our tools to explore new methodologies to create learning games, as described in this post from the STEG08 Workshop.

One of the most appealing “artifacts” of this initiative was an educational created by our German partners to help Afghan locals understand the procedures involved in archeological work at the Bamiyan Valley Cultural Heritage site. Niels Drobek was one of the main developers for that educational game, which stands as one of the earliests applications of the <e-Adventure> platform in a real setting.

He has put together a video about the game, and it was great to see what they accomplished with such an early version of the platform (it even has the unicorn cursor!). Thank you Niels for your great work.

<e-Adventure> educational games, projects, travelling

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

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

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.

Personal reflections, travelling

Yay! Another research stay. This time I’m visiting Coimbra, one of the most ancient and respected universities in Europe. There I will be at working at the Departamento de Engenharia Informática the with António José Mendes in giving the final touches to my thesis.

I will be leaving next week and come back by the end of October. This means that by the day I come back, I will have been abroad for 9 out of 16 months. Not bad!

My only two concerns are whether with all this travelling I may eventually forget the faces of my loved ones and the fact that I leave for Coimbra in three days and I’m still homeless. Any reader from Coimbra knows a place where I could crash on sunday?

Research travelling

Haven’t I used that title before?

Just a quick post to remind myself that I’m not dead, that I supposedly maintain a blog and that my vacations haven’t started yet. Mostly bad news.

I’m currently trying to put together all the stuff I’ve done in the last few years about games and learning in a big boring document that noone will ever read but that my advisor strongly feels I should write and won’t allow me not to do it. He calls it a thesis or something like that. Sigh.

Personal reflections, travelling

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I am again enjoying a research fellowship at the MGH / HMS Lab of Computer Science in Boston. Even though I am involved in a number of projects here, the main objective of the stay is to integrate the <e-Adventure> engine with the .LRN online learning environment that recently announced support for the IMS LD specification.

What does integration mean here? The idea is that <e-Adventure> games can be embedded in an IMSLD Unit of Learning and launched in the student’s computer from the .LRN platform. <e-Adventure> includes built-in mechanisms for assessment and adaptive learning, and these systems are connected to the Unit of Learning.

What does connected mean here? It means that the events that happen during the execution of the UoL before launching the game will affect the behavior of the game (tapping into the adaptation mechanism) and that whatever happens inside the game is logged by the assessment mechanism and reported to the .LRN environment in order to affect the execution of the UoL after the game.

The objective is thus to replicate and enhance the work I did at the Open University of the Netherlands a few months ago, although this time we will be paying special attention to making a general purpose solution. This means that the integration will be designed in such a way that the <e-Adventure> side should work with any IMSLD compliant system and that the .LRN side should work with any game that follows the public APIs that I’m developing here.

Moreover, in order to demonstrate all this, we will be developing at least two games during my stay. One should be an adventure game implemented with <e-Adventure> and the other a small game developed from scratch that uses the APIs to communicate with .LRN. Both games will be included in a couple of Units of Learning that will also contain “traditional” content. Unfortunately, we still haven’t found an appropriate topic for the games/UoLs. Fortunately, you are reading this and maybe you have suggestion.

Additionally, I’m taking advantage of the fact that I’m staying in Boston and going to a lot of talks, conferences and events, where I’m meeting a lot of very interesting people. I’m glad to say that <e-Adventure> seems to be gathering a nice amount of interest, which has finally driven me to update the project’s website. New samples, revised texts and… Yes! We have finally published a fully-functional version of the engine for download!

Mind you, it is not a release, just a stable snapshot of the codebase, compiled as a jar file and offered for download. It is an uncompleted and unsupported download. The official beta release of the <e-Adventure> engine is scheduled for July 2007.

Enjoy!

<e-Adventure> e-learning, educational games, projects, travelling