Professor Maja Pivec, University of Applied Sciences – FH Joanneum, Graz, Austria

The first talk was by Maja Pivec from the University of Applied Sciences in Austria who works with ISFE and European Schoolnet who conducted a literature review of 130 reports on game based learning (GBL). It was noticed that the majority had not undertaken a vigourous methodology when conducting their research. It was however found that GBL:

·         can be used to lead and direct learning

·         offer a more relaxed, less peer pressured environment 

·         is widely viewed as a safe and creative environment for learning

Pivec put forward that it was necessary for teachers to take advantage of these tools but that most teachers currently do not use them due to limitations in resources and ability.

65% of teachers asked were interested in using games in the classroom but lacked not just the technology but assistance and training to implement them.

Pivec believes that as games development is an expensive undertaking that most developers will not undertake GBL, and teachers will therefore have to adapt off the shelf games to suit the purpose.

Within the field of GBL the teacher becomes a facilitator, but there is a problem in that most teachers are not gamers and even if they are, they do not know how to integrate the use of games within the classroom.

This would indicate the need for staff with the knowledge of games based learning that can support, train and create resources for teachers who wish to incorporate games into education.

Further reading can be found at www.Engagelearning.eu

The literature review can be found here: http://isfe-eu.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=u4jalp5rp1ig41rs1fvsbu6o84&oidit=T001:w7ol0v3qaghqd4ccxic50wc9x

Dawn Hallybone, London Borough of Redbridge
Steve Bunce, Northumberland County Council
Vicky MacKenzie, Teacher, Lairdsland Primary, East Dunbartonshire
Kim Applin, Learning & Teaching Scotland
Anna Rossvoll, Aberdeenshire Council

The talks from these delegates focused on the use of games within the primary education sector primarily using the Nintendo Wii and DS platforms as a core on which to hang subject based activities such as using Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training to develop mental maths abilities, using Cooking Mama to teach cooking skills that are then applied to make food to be sold for an Enterprise unit, and using Guitar Hero as the basis of creative writing.

These talks seemed more focused on learning using games rather that games based learning.  The games were used in the same way a text might have been used ten years ago, without bringing the interactivity of the medium into play. While completely applicable to the KS1, KS2, and possibly even KS3 of the national curriculum, this would be of no with more mature students.

What was interesting however was how these were used to encourage and develop collaborative learning. Students had to work in groups to create communal pieces of work such as “diving logs” of their time playing Endless Ocean.

Friday 20^th March 2009

Tom Watson MP

Mr Watson wanted to lend his support to the games industry and become the voice for the industry in Parliament. When talking about the use of games in school he commented “What we call technology, they call life” and that children today “work, think and play differently than their parents” and that as a result we require a “21^st century education system for 21^st century needs”.

Nolan Bushnell – Co-founder of Atari

Nolan Bushnell, widely recognised as founder of the video games industry and founder of Atari, proposed a new way of teaching, which he calls the SNAP Education System.

He commented that “ignorance and apathy are the enemies”, that the classroom no longer works and that there is more competition for the attention of students today. He made the comparison that if a TV show wanted to reduce its ratings to 0 it would “put on a talking head”, inferring that this is what is essentially happening within the education system. He asked how you compete with media that have such higher production values.

Bushnell then went on to observe that within the traditional classroom setting the delivery is in a one to many format with the majority of the class being either lost or bored, and that the majority of time in the classroom is spent on discipline.

He then proposed the abolition of the classroom and to instead have subject specialists be available from a “mission control” style hub on an open source platform via the internet that the students can access as and when they need to.

He argues that this methods of teaching would allow the focus to be on the individual. The self-esteem of the student can be increased through the differentiation of the taught materials. He argues that this system would allow students to excel in spite of any external factors in their lives.

The computer can act as a catch all for all subjects including music and art, with Dance Dance Revolution teaching coordination and Guitar Hero being likened to three chord songs. The computer can be used to reduce the barrier to the creative process that comes from the lack of expertise in the artistic techniques.

Within the system he sees students writing a short amount, every hour with the correction of this text received within ten minutes and being outsourced to non-teaching staff to optimise the time spent by teachers actually teaching.

He then went on to talk about the compulsory introduction of exercise into the program, with a period of 20 minutes at 80%-90% of the student’s maximum heart rate. This would encourage neurogenesis, the development of new neurons within the brain.

Game based learning within this would allow for greater integration for those students for whom English is not their first language, with language selection options. Bushnell puts forward that it will also give a system of establishing pre-conditioned knowledge – a so called “mind inventory” that can be built upon with further modularly delivered units.

A abridged copy of the talk can be found here: http://newlearning.blip.tv/file/1905445/

Graeme Duncan – Chief Executive, Caspian Learning

Founded in 2002 Caspian Learning specialises in games and simulations for the commercial, military and education sectors.

Focusing bespoke solutions, they have produced “Rome in Danger”, an educational game based on Roman history, which has scored 98% in engagement as scored by 300 trial students.

They argue that engagement is only one factor that can be measured in ensuring the product is effective and that safe failure can also be a factor. This was then illustrated using an army simulation of a vehicle checkpoint, allowing officers to apply prior knowledge in context and get immediate, audio-visual feedback on the decisions they make.

He then went on to discuss the application of “Web 3.0” technologies in the application of games based learning, with the application of 3d technologies via online, casual and social games. The platform will be able to facilitate learning via the internet.

Within the “media savvy” generation, people are demanding more digitally demanding within the work setting. These can make learning more immersive, more contextual, give the ability for safe failure, critical thinking and immediate feedback.

Duncan also predicted the move of GBL over to the internet and its introduction into social media networks and casual games sites such as Facebook and Playfish.

Dr Jacob Habgood – Head of Serious Games, Sumo Digital

Dr Jacob Habgood describes previous edutainment games as “chocolate covered broccoli”; the game is the chocolate, the broccoli the education, children eat the chocolate and leave the broccoli. The learning content is extrinsic to the game, tacked onto an existing game rather than being a part of it.

Habgood suggests making the learning content more intrinsic and illustrates this with his PhD game, Zombie Division which he used to empirically prove that intrinsic games are more motivating as measured by the amount of time spent playing and the knowledge gained buy the students using a pre-post-delay test method.

He has since developed a WiiWare title called Outnumbered that teaches maths that further illustrates the intrinsic integration of learning content. He argues you don’t have to make maths fun, it is merely a medium to work with.

The game covers the relations and connections between addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and integrates the learning content into the core mechanics of the game.

The game has players trying to protect their tower from monsters with numbers above their heads that scroll in from the left side of the screen. Players must hang the numbered goo on the monsters to reduce their number to 0. Should the player subtract too far and fall below 0 then the goo falls off and they must start again. The player can also grow their own monsters to defend their tower, using the addition of numbered goo to grow them to a numerical size that is able to defeat the attackers. Magic is then introduced to introduce multiplication and division.

The difficulty of the game is then controlled using a cognitive model to track the application of the key concepts and differentiate the player experience.

Sean Dromgoole – CEO, Some Research / Gamevision

Dromgoole discussed some of the research figures surrounding the games market as found in autumn 2008.

There are 55.3 million people in the UK aged 6+ of which 16.7 million are active gamers (active defined as bought or played a game in the last year). Within this the major platforms are the Sony PSP (2 million), Sony Playstation 3 (2 million), Microsoft Xbox 360 (2.3 million), PC (3.9 million), Nintendo DS (5.8 million) and the Nintendo Wii (6.1 million).

Looking at gender balance, the PS3 and 360 markets were 75% male, while the Wii was virtually gender neutral.

It was also noted that the majority of play takes place offline, with women preferring to play offline with other people.

Dromgoole then impressed that the nature of a good game is good gameplay, before breaking this down into its component parts:

·         understanding a given environment

·         teaching skills that can be used in the environment

·         testing those skills

·         completing of tasks

·         rewarding the player

·         progressing to the next stage

He then observed that this is incredibly similar to the teaching methods used in school.

He also mentioned research conducted by the developers of EVE Online, into the maximum size of an effectively communicating group on the internet, which was indicated as standing at 180 people.

Summary

Though there did seem to be a heavy focus on off the shelf games used in schools, there were some core concepts that reinforced the work we are doing with the Phoenix ARG.

Pivec’s discussion on GBL and how it can lead and direct learning with the teacher as facilitator mirrors the intentions of our project though I however disagree with the her perceived cost of producing games. The PC market, Wiiware or Xbox Live Arcade have far less development costs associated with them, predominantly due to the lower technical demands and digital distribution methods that are associated with the platforms.

The primary education talks, while aimed more at learning using games, did raise the point of games being a facilitator for collaborative working, another aspect of our game.

Watson’s quote of “we require a “21^st century education system for 21^st century needs” resonates with our aims and while Bushnell’s concepts are radical to say the least he also made some valid points about the amount of time spent on classroom disruptions and that GBL can be used to enable student differentiation.

Games as a means of “safe failure” as mentioned by Duncan was something that we are wanting to develop on within our ARG, the nature of simulation aspect allowing them to respond to challenges within a turnaround company without having the serious consequences that would result from poor judgement. I also concurred with his appraisal (though obviously biased by his company’s position) that games and game based learning will make greater use of the vast resource that is the internet.

Dr. Habgood’s talk on intrinsic integration was by far the most beneficial talk of the conference. His work on integrating the learning content into the game will be of great benefit in creating the ARG, as well as for my dissertation. It really impressed on me the necessity to avoid the “chocolate covered broccoli” approach that defined the edutainment era of the early 1990s.

Dromgoole’s talk on the facts and figures surrounding the UK games industry was useful as much from a personal standpoint as for designing the ARG. It is quite rare to get definitive figures from the games industry and so to hear from someone who analyses data for all the major industry publishers was very enlightening.

While the talks were interesting I also had the opportunity to network with conference delegates over the course of the two days, meeting people from TruSim, Sumo Digital and Ideonic all game developers looking into creating serious games. Talking with these people helped me to get an idea of where developers are looking when it comes markets for GBL and the process they use when creating game based learning.

The issue with this at the moment is that the account we have with UK2.net only affords us one mySQL database (as I understand it, the UK2 support sites are terrible).

That said there were a couple of talks that were of use. The talk by Graeme Duncan of Caspian Learning highlighted the ability of games based learning to enable “safe failure” illustrated by a simulation that had created allowing Army officers to run through the setting up of a vehicle checkpoint. Should the officer get the procedure wrong they can see what the consequences of that would have been without putting themselves or their men in danger. Although not to the same extreme this is something we are hoping to achieve with the ARG.

The other talk that I found incredibly useful was that by Dr Jacob Habgood, Head of Serious Games at Sumo Digital. He spoke about making the learning content intrinsic to the game by incorporating it into the gameplay mechanisms. Again this is something I am hoping to achieve with the ARG.

I’ve been playing around with the Bugle site this morning, after noticing that the theme we are using (Mimbo – excellent theme) doesn’t tie in with the d/m/y settings on WordPress. After some fishing around on the internet I found out how to change this and went through the php files to alter it. It wouldn’t be great for the suspension of disbelief if a British newspaper site was using American date formats! I’m also looking at tieing the site to Twitter so that is tweets when a new story is uploaded and adding an advertisement widgit, initially to help tie the site to the Porthampton City Council site, but perhaps in future this could be a source of revenue to sustain the unit.

This, the Phoenix site, and the PCC site are all live in their current forms but will probably be tweaked further. Trying to sort out the email addresses for the various sites atm, UK2.net are not being particularly clear with their support on how to go about this ¬_¬

Also, off to the Game Based Learning Conference 2009 later in the week, hope to come away with some ideas that we can implement into the game.

I have actually found it quite challenging, not having wrote in a journalistic style before. It was especially difficult when trying not to incorporate any specific dates so that the stories would have to be changed as little as possible when it runs in subsequent years.

The slide animations haven’t come up so if you want to see it properly I’d recommend a download. Please feel free to comment

We had our first meeting back yesterday and it was more of a touch base than anything. We did however decide it was best to scrap a couple of the sites we had initially decided upon as it was no loger felt they would be necessary. The first to be cut was the city resident blog. This had been in the outline document when I had first put it together and really I should have pulled it a while back. With the way the course and story have developed there is no real need for this.

The second was the business competitor website. After chatting with Simon it seemed that as they were going to be looking at retail best prectice as a whole, that they should be finding examples of how it should be done themselves rather than us providing them with that information.

We’ve decided to invest in a copy of Basecamp, a piece of online project management software. I might have mentioned it before but we’ve been using it for a while in its trial form and it’s proving really useful for keeping an eye on what needs to be done.

Simon fed back on a contact he made at a conference in Warwick last week that looks promising. We might have found someone to sort out our leaderboard for us. We’re going to both try and spec something up ready for our next meeting so that we can get them to do something “white label” for us that can be reused should anyone else in the uni want to try it out.

Now that the unit descriptor has been submitted as well, Simon can start to put together the basics of what need to be included in the report so that we can gear the weekly challenges to provide the students with the skills and knowledge they will need to apply to achieve and hopefully surpass this.

We then turned to business and more specifically our consultancy which now has a name! We will be calling the company Phoenix UK Ltd, after brainstorming on the way to London for the conference and stewing on the names we came up with. As the company specialises in turning companies around we wanted a name that helped to reflect this.

We’ve also decided on a failing business.  The business will be a old-fashioned men’s clothing store, one of those tweed jacket, corduroy trouser type places that has been around for years but has fallen on hard times.

On exposing the students to the game we’ve decided to make the game and competition elements more overt (thanks to Dan Hon and Alex Moseley for the inspiration) with the students taking part in a competitive internship with the best few people being “hired” by the company and receiving prizes.

This allows us to be far more open with the assessment aspect of the course and to incorporate a leader board to help motivate students and provide formative feedback throughout the course. We were looking at having some sort of continual peer feedback based on perceived contribution (something I saw in a talk by Randy Pausch) and this would tie into the new leader board as well as performance in conference calls and presentations held throughout the course.

Where the competition element is now going to be overt we have the ability to set the students specific tasks without having to overly mask them. Things like sending groups off to do things can be handled in a direct way instead of having to come up with a convoluted reason for it. This is going to include sending them to do field research into retail best practice, taking pictures and video of things they think reflect this which they will then present to their peers to be assessed.

There will also be a final presentation to the store and consultancy board. For the board we’re hoping to get a few people in from local industry and have the groups present in an almost “Dragon’s Den” style way.

The finance aspect looks to be the primary focus of the unit upon which we will then hang the marketing and personnel issues on that, with some of them cropping up as curveballs during the duration of the game.

In order to ensure the students can deal with these arising challenges there will be a number of frontloaded “seminars” to supply them with the foundations of the relevant knowledge for them to then take away and build upon.

All in all it’s coming together slowly. Now I just have to write this stuff into the design

Last Friday I attended a conference organised by Adrian & Dan Hon, co-founders of Six to Start with Channel 4 generously donating the screening room hidden underneath the giant 3D “4” outside their building. All the proceeds from the conference went to Cancer Research UK.

The people attending seemed to come from a fairly varied area considering the niche area for the talks. There were the obvious academics and charity bods but also people from Channel 4, the BBC, marketing companies, and corporate fields.

The first talk of the day was that of Juliette Culver from Open University and Law 37, the team behind the Cancer Research UK ARG Operation Sleeper Cell. Law 37 were the winners of a competition organised by Adrian Hon to create an ARG design for the charity. Juliette presented some interesting figures on the game, and given that the team were all volunteers running with a very small budget, they managed to triple the charity’s initial investment, raising over £3000.

Some key advice I took from Juilette’s talk:

·         Try not to take on too much, it’s easier to add stuff than to take it away

·         Don’t have too many developers, keep the team tight and have regular face to face meetings where possible

·         Nail the design early on in development

·         Make sure to aim at your end user

·         Get your difficulty curve right, start easy and build up from there.

Next was Alice Taylor from Channel 4 Education, who talked about some of the things that the Channel are trying in order to reach 14-19 year old British children. Although she couldn’t talk in specifics about the upcoming projects they are working on I will definitely be keeping a close eye on them in the new year to see what crops up. Alice also has a great personal games related blog called Wonderland which I’d really recommend checking out.

Alice was then followed by Philip Trippenbach,  a journalist with BBC Current Affairs, who talked about the splintering audience and how to reach those people and have them reach the BBC. He touched on citizen journalism and how with todays technologically minded audiences it is possible to get more of the story, showing the BBC pages for the recent Mumbai attacks and the facility on there for the general public on the scene to input their views and information on the developing story.

Something that Philip was interested in that I also find quite intriguing was ARGs as a model of communication and social media. He talked about the ability of ARGs to create networks and to develop a challenge structure that can be used for more than just games and how in the environment of viral media perhaps the likes of Superstruct and World Without Oil are “inoculation media”.

Philip also blogs on games and the media at trippenbach.com

We then moved into the academic section of the conference with three talks on the use of ARGs in education, one that is used as the basis for an assessed unit and two that were used as means to help student induction.

ARGOSI

The first of the three talks was given by Nicola Whitton, Project Manager on the JISC funded project called ARGOSI (Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction) which as the name would indicate was focused on supporting the induction process Manchester Metropolitan University.

Nicola discussed the active learning experience and how it should be contextualised, collaborative, experiential and enquiry based, with scaffolding supplied though increasing difficulty as the student progresses.

The idea of ARGs being able to provide the advantages of more traditional game based learning but at a lower cost was one that I remember mentioning to Simon when we were discussing the idea of doing the ARG in Portsmouth, as well as making it a reusable model so that it could be rolled out to the new intake each year.

Nicola also summarised the six motivators for students within the game:

·         Completing

·         Competition

·         Puzzle solving

·         Storyline

·         Community

·         Creativity

I hope we will be able to cover each of these motivators in some way, shape or form within our own ARG, although we will probably replace puzzle solving with challenges as we are not intending to have any real puzzles as they wouldn’t really fit into the context of our game.

The difficult of making challenges fun was something that Nicola mentioned and I have also thought could be an issue with our game. Nicola however observed that as long as there was fun in the mid to long terms goals then having some of the short term goals be not so fun wasn’t too much of an issue.

Something that I also thought might be worth implementing in our ARG which came out of Nicola’s talk was the idea of giving the players a number of challenges to pick and choose from at the start, even if they have to do all of them this could give more of a perception of control and influence on the part of the player. There also needs to be real motivation for real world events, which I’m hoping we will be able to provide preferably using the carrot rather than the stick.

Towards the end of her talk Nicola provided the following questions which should be asked of any educational ARG. How do you:

·         Provide motivation

·         Provide inclusivity

·         Provide accessibility

·         Develop autonomy

·         Build in reflection on learning

The Great History Conundrum

Next on the bill was Alex Moseley from the University of Leicester. Alex used an ARG based game with similarities to Perplex City to teach an assessed History unit on Research Skills.

The game provided 50 puzzles at varying levels of difficulty, allowing students of differing ability to be able to play the game at a level suitable for them.  This is combined with the University’s VLE forums to encourage collaboration in the completion of tasks. The successful completion of the puzzles and participation in the forums were then scored and these scores were the basis of a leaderboard that seemed to act as a strong motivational factor. The idea of the leaderboard intrigued me, especially when combined with my own experiences of things such as Xbox Live where people compare Achievements and Gamer Points in order to gain “bragging rights”.

The figures were pretty encouraging from the unit, with 181 (90%) of the students passing the unit, and 92 of those getting 60%+

Who is Herring Hale & What Is GG?

These were two ARGs run by Katie Piatt from the University of Brighton, used as a means of general induction to university life.

“Who is Herring Hale?” was the initial ARG followed by “What is GG?” a year later, using the lessons Katie had learned. Unfortunately Katie’s ARGs did not meet with a lot of uptake, perhaps due to the sheer amount of stuff going on during the induction period. Talking about her experiences with ARGs it seemed that they were very much based around the traditional rabbit hole/TINAG type of entry into the game. I wonder if whether if the game aspect were more overt whether there would have been more of an uptake. This could perhaps be reflected in the success of her current project, which is an induction version of the Facebook game “The Never Ending Movie Quiz” which is obviously a game, is immediate in its feedback and doesn’t requite much in the way of time investment on the part of the students. Katie reaffirmed the comment made by Alex about the leader board being a strong motivator for students.

This is not to say that her games were not interesting and certainly looked quite fun but perhaps the use of such a traditional (if you can use that term with such a new media form) design was not inclusive enough for the general student population.

Something that the day to this point had got me thinking about was having our desing start with low effort, high reward tasks and them changing the ratio until it was a more even balance as a means of pulling students in. I’m not really sure what form the rewards should take as yet though…

Breakout Session

The panel of academics had us split into groups and consider how to combine industry, games design and education in a way that benefitted all parties. The group that Simon and I were part of seemed to raise more questions than answers but it definitely let me explore how ARGs could be applied in different ways and different fields.

Out of the many things that were batted around the table were the following:

·         The need for collaboration, not just between students but also between industry and education in order to ensure its relevance

·         Make the most of the industry expertise. This really ties in with the above point

·         Have an assessment article that is relevant to the industry or individual business you are working with

·         The possibility of having local industry members set a problem to students who then come back at the end of the game/unit to present their findings (a variation on our game)

·         The power of the community was raised and how their discussions on forums could serve as quite a powerful piece of documentation to industry in its own right, for example as a record of what teenagers think about varying fashions it could be quite valuable as market research.

·         The end artefact needs to be complex enough to make large group work a necessity.

There were more sessions following on from this, a potential charity endeavour called GameRaid, which in all honesty didn’t really appeal too much to me but good luck to them.

Nicola Smythe from the BBC then talked about the more theoretical side of things with her background in experience design and how to break down and analyse the experience. While interesting from a theoretical point of view, I was looking for more practical advice so didn’t make much in the way of notes.

The day was ended with a talk from Dan Hon, who pretty much pulled ARG design as it stands apart and put forward what needs to change. I really thought this talk summarised what I hoped to gain from the day with what not to do and what I should be doing when creating the design for our ARG.

The day was followed by a few drinks in the pub and a more relaxed chat. Thanks to everyone who was patient enough to put up with my incessant questioning! I hope that the event will be the first of many and look forward to seeing the projects that come out of it.