Game Based Learning Conference & Bugle site

The Game Based Learning Conference was a mixed bag. The vast majority of the conference seemed focused on using off the shelf games with KS1, 2 & 3. There was little in the way of examples of what was going on in the commercial of higher/further education sectors.

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.

WordPress up and running on the Bugle site

I’ve got WordPress up and running on the Porthampton Bugle site. We were initially going to use a free theme called Slickpress but on installing the theme on the server it didn’t seem to want to work properly. Rather than spend ages wading through the php and css for the theme I decided to look at what else was available and found a theme named Mimbo, which seems equally as good. I have now installed this on the server and will be playing around with it a bit to see how it looks with a few posts thrown in.

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.

Writing stories

I have spent most of my time over the last week or so creating some of the fictional news stories for the Porthampton City Council and Porthampton Bugle websites. The stories will be posted at predetermined times throughout the course and will bring to light various opportunities and threats that students will be (hopefully) incorporate into their report of recommendations to the failing retailer.

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.

MashUP event

We gave a presentation on our work so far to the MashUP event being help in The Space, the dedicated gallery area at the univesity. The project seemed to be well recieved, generating some interest and possible future collaborations. The presentation was filmed so I’ll hopefully be able to get a copy of it to post up here. In the mean time here are the presentation slides…

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

WordPress for the news site?

I’ve been researching into how best to create the news website for the ARG I’m working on with my relatively limited web design skills. The best route I’ve found seems to be to use WordPress and use a free custom theme I’ve found to get the geneal styling of a newspaper website. I’ll then adjust the CSS in order to fit it to our needs. I’ve learnt that you can upload WordPress to a webspace on your own server which seems pretty easy (although obviously I’ve yet to try it) or just host it on WordPress.com and have a purchased domain name point at it. Either way this seems a very useful way of creating content without having to slog through all the web design stage. It should also make it easier for whoever is involved in running the unit to upload new news stories to help progress the game.

Meeting 14/1/2009

Ok, first off happy new year to whoever’s reading this

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.

Game meeting 11/12/2008

We started out meeting by chatting about the ARG conference I’ve already talked about and both Simon and I thought that the day had been a really beneficial event, excellent speakers, fantastic facilities and a great opportunity to talk to others about what they were doing.

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

ARGs in Charity and Education – Friday 5th December

Ok first off some apologies: sorry this has taken a week to get up here, sorry it’s so ridiculously long and sorry for any omissions or misinterpretations.

 

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.

Superstruct

While doing research into Alternate Reality Games prior to pitching the idea to Simon Brookes in the Portsmouth Centre for Enterprise, I found that most ARGs were quite organic and freeform. They allowed the player to dip in and out as they wanted did not require the player to really submit much (if any) information about themselves, rather concentrating on a player’s ability to contribute to what Jane McGonigal calls in her paper “Why I Love Bees”, the “collective intelligence”.

I was concerned that by trying to adopt an ARG model into an Enterprise unit would perhaps infringe on the freeform nature of the game when considering the student assessment criteria that would be necessary,. So it was reassuring that when Superstruct launched a couple of days age (www.superstruct.org) to see that ARGs can be implemented with a slightly more defined structure.

The game uses a registration process that includes a “survival profile” essentially gearing players towards the goals that McGonigal et al wish to achieve, the identification of how people will live in 2019 and how they will deal with the 5 global issues identified by her and her team.