Adventure Author

Making Games in Schools teachers to present at SQA conference

2011-01-13T12:35:24+00:00

Congratulations to James and Stephen who will presenting their Making Games in Schools work at an SQA Conference on Games Based Learning at Abertay University on March the 19th!

Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration

2010-11-21T11:27:39+00:00

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

I was interested to read about a really fantastic National Science Foundation funded project called Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration. Taking place at McKinley Tech and George Mason University, the project encourages young people into STEM careers through weekend and summer courses in computer game design. I particularly like two aspects of Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration (GDMC). Firstly, the students learn with slightly more experienced peer mentors as well as an instructor. This can be a very effective model because both the mentor and the mentee can learn a lot, and it gives the teacher much needed assistance in a busy class full of temperamental computers and children. (If you want to know more about different models for effective mentoring Kafai et al (2009) is a good place to start). Secondly, the students also learn about science subjects and integrate their new knowledge into their games e.g. after input from a Federation of American Scientists biologist, the students’ games included accurate information about antibiotics, glial cells and neurotransmitters. If we can’t convince every child to become a computer scientist, any kind of scientist will have to do.

Game design projects are increasingly popular in education, and the evidence is starting to accumulate about the effectiveness of such schemes. In an article published earlier this year in Computers and Education, Vos and colleagues (Vos, van der Meijden and Denessen, 2010) compared students’ motivation and use of strategies for deep learning when they either played a simple memory drag and drop game, or constructed their own such game. The children enjoyed making games more than playing them, and were more likely to use deep learning strategies while doing so. A notable finding from this study was that the children were less motivated in the play condition than by their normal classroom lessons. This just goes to show that if you’re going to spend classroom time on a game, it had better be good, or you might as well not bother. Or perhaps a more positive way of looking at that would be to say it takes a high quality game to beat an enthusiastic teacher.

Game genre and graphical quality are likely to be factors here. The simple 2D board game style application in this study looks rather dull in comparison to the sort of action game you might find gracing the screen of a Wii. It may well be that making an online board game is more fun than playing it only because playing it isn’t that exciting to start with. In contrast, the Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration students learn a wider range of technical skills which enables them to make 3D games with proper physics. I think this is pretty important because in my experience kids want to make games which look and feel as good as the games they play at home. After all, they want their friends to be impressed when they play them. So hats off to the students on GDMC: your counterparts across the pond in Scotland salute you!

Kafai, Desai, Peppler, Chiu and Moya (2009). “The Multiple Roles of Mentoring” From Kafai, Peppler, Chapman (Eds). The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities”. Teachers College Press, New York. “

Nienke Vos, Henny van der Meijden, Eddie Denessen, Effects of constructing versus playing an educational game on student motivation and deep learning strategy use, Computers & Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Serious Games, January 2011, Pages 127-137, ISSN 0360-1315, DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.08.013.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VCJ-50XS6C5-1/2/06e4ca67e68d2f5495080e31814a2062)

Adventure Author team reunion

2010-10-25T20:56:00+01:00

Keiron, Judy, Ian and Cathrin at a project meeting this month which brought together the members of the old AA team plus the new arrival. Note the tea and cake, an important part of any of our meetings.

Quest to Learn

2010-09-21T21:48:26+01:00

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

There was a thought provoking article in the New York Times last week on games in education. Author of the indigestible yet indispensable academic game design bible Rules of Play, Katie Salen has project in a New York city school called Quest to Learn in which children's learning is based around game playing and design. It sounds like a big budget, integrated version of what teachers in the UK have been doing in their own practice (look out for details of this in an upcoming Futurelab report): the teachers playing games on a big screen in front of the class while soliciting advice from a super-engaged drooling set of kids; learners using game authoring software to explore concepts with game design. What's different is that this project has been systematically devised and rolled out across a school, rather than relying on the individual innovative practice of some teachers. Particularly telling in the fact that there are three game designers working with eleven teachers to devise games around interdisciplinary curricular content. That's a fantastic resource, and unfortunately unlikely to happen in the UK anytime soon given the current monumental cuts in public spending.

Furthermore, there are many hearts and minds to be won over here about the efficacy of games in education. The article acknowledges that 6th graders who took part in Quest to Learn did no better on standardized tests than learners who had not had the privilege. This makes me uneasy. Sure, you can argue that the Quest to Learn project values different educational goals which are more relevant to 21st century society than ordinary curricula (such as team work or problem solving) and that therefore different assessment tools are required. But is this just special pleading? It may be that we need to win the wider battle of making school assessment more appropriate to the skills required in current society before we worry about installing Wiis in the class.

One of the most interesting aspects of the article was related to the metaphor used to organise school life. The author writes:

"What if we blurred the line between academic subjects and remained the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room, or child's bedroom or even a child's pocket circa 2010...what if, instead of seeing school the way we have alway seen it, we saw school for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?". School as a video game is certainly likely to be a more appealing metaphor to children than the current ones. Guy Claxton argues that schools are currently organized around a factory metaphor, full of grim tasks which must be completed and overseen by a supervisor figure, and time strictly marshalled by bells. He proposes a metaphor which he considers to be more fruitful: learning as gymnasium, where learners strive to improve their own performance by exercising their brains in an enjoyable fashion. This is consistent with the learning as game metaphor, but perhaps more general purpose. In any case, it is about time we reconsidered how schools work as learning spaces. The industrial revolution has had its day, and we are beginning to realise it is counter productive to coop children up in learning factories. That's why we need experiments like Quest to Learn.

Welcome to the new Adventure Author team member

2010-05-17T12:09:35+01:00

The world welcomes Ian Herschel Robertson Seymour, born on 24th April weighing 8 lbs. His mum is Judy, leader of the AA project.

Turns out brain training games don't work

2010-04-23T13:42:29+01:00

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

My mother-in-law was mortified by her first attempt to play a brain training game on the Nintendo DS. Her brain age, as calculated by this unflattering device, was at least 15 years too old. This is mainly because the speech and handwriting recognition wasn't accurate enough initially rather than because of any cognitive misdemeanours on her part. In common with the smugness of the Wii Fit's representation of one's body shape, it does raise the question of why users put up with nagging interfaces, which are at least as annoying as impolite or over-proactive interfaces. Maybe you put up with your brain training game nagging you because you think it will make you more clever?Or remember more? Or think faster? Do you- like the puzzled folk on Dr Kaswashima's Braintraining web site- struggle to remember what you had for dinner two nights ago?

Sadly, a new study published in Nature is here to disabuse of this happy notion. Brain training games only make you better at brain training games. They don't improve your performance on general cognitive tasks, even those closely related to the games. To give you an idea of how much training you would need to do to see even a small improvement in memory, the authors write: “To illustrate the size of the transfer effects observed in this study, consider the following representative example from the data. The increase in the number of digits that could be remembered following training on tests designed, at least in part, to improve memory (for example, in experimental group 2) was three-hundredths of a digit. Assuming a linear relationship between time spent training and improvement, it would take almost four years of training to remember one extra digit. Moreover, the control group improved by two-tenths of a digit, with no formal memory training at all.”

Well worth it, then.

An interesting feature of the study was that it was conducted online with 11,430 participants, which just goes to show that you get big data sets by collaborating with the BBC's popular science shows (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bang/). It rather knocks the previous brain training study I blogged about in the shade with their ~600 participants.

At any rate, it is time to stop falling for the Nicole Kidman adverts and give up your daily brain training. Do what you've been longing to do and tell that obnoxious homunculas of Dr Kawashima where to go.I suggest using your handheld as a cognitive prosthesis instead. Who needs to remember an extra digit in a phone number when you can get your handheld to store it for you?

Book on creativity and education

2010-03-29T11:04:48+01:00

[Here is a book you might be interested by a Canadian colleague and friend of the Adventure Author team]

NEW from Cambridge Scholars Press

Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity in Education

Edited by Kieran Egan and Krystina Madej

14 essays from authors around the world that explore imaginative understanding and how to teach children "to think creatively, to be innovative, enterprising, and capable" in today's challenging world. Topics include first "theories of development, imagination, and creativity" followed by discussions of new approaches to broader educational issues such as responsible citizenship, gender, and special needs education, to curriculum subjects such as literacy, science, and mathematics, and to important educational environments such as the museum.

URL to Cambridge Scholars Press

http://www.c-s-p.org//Flyers/Engaging-Imaginations-and-Developing-Creativity1-4438-1763-5.htm

Also available at Amazon.com.

From the Back Cover

Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity in Education
Editors: Kieran Egan and Krystina Madej

Imagination is the Source of Creativity and Invention! This series of essays has been collected expressly to bring readers new ideas about imagination and creativity in education that will both stimulate discussion and debate and also contribute practical ideas for how to infuse our daily classrooms with imaginative activities. In a world that values creative innovation, it is distressing that our schools are dominated by an educational paradigm that pays too little attention to engaging the imagination and emotions of students in the curriculum and the worlds challenges that the curriculum is designed to prepare students to meet. The ability of children to think creatively, to be innovative, enterprising, and capable, depends greatly on providing a rich imagination-based educational environment. It is only when we consider the imagination a vital component of our lives and one of the great workhorses of learning that we recognize the importance of adding the imaginative to the study of the affective, cognitive, and physical modes of our development. Doing so fills a gap that has led to incomplete accounts of childrens development, their subsequent learning needs, and indeed, how to fulfill these needs in educational environments.

This discussion, about the importance of imagination and creativity in education, has been taken up by researchers and educators around the world. It is represented here by writings from authors from Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Japan, and Romania. In the first part of this book these authors explore and discuss theories of development, imagination, and creativity. In the second part they extend these theories to broader social issues such as responsible citizenship, gender, and special needs education, to new approaches to curriculum subjects such as literacy, science, and mathematics, and to the educational environment of the museum.

Kieran Egan in a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. He is currently Director of the IERG. His interests include trying to sketch a somewhat new educational scheme based in part of Vygotskian ideas, and also working out ways to help students and teachers find the regular subjects of the curriculum more imaginatively engaging. He graduated from London University with a B.A. in History, and from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in Education.

Krystina Madej is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. She was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow with IERG. Her research is concerned with how narrative is mediated by different technologies and creates meaning for us, in particular in digital narrative and video games. She returned to academia after a successful career in communications and design. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, a MAPW from Kennesaw State University, and a PhD in Digital Narrative from Simon Fraser University.

Comments on the last Making Games in Schools training workshop from EPSRC mentor

2010-03-29T10:14:18+01:00

Making Games in Schools Workshop, 17^th – 19^th March 2010 By Ray Mathias

As mentor * for MGiS I see my role as a critical friend (and occasional adviser) to the project. As well as seeking to support the success of MGiS, I am also interested in the lessons that we can learn from it, which might inform similar projects in the future. So I come to the project with several questions, from ‘how does the Adventure Author software work?’ to ‘how effectively can a making games approach be integrated into classroom teaching?’ to ‘how far could we extend this approach across disciplines/the curriculum?’ It is self-evident that if learning to use the software is not a barrier to using it, and the games it produces are good quality, then it will engage some students. However, will engagement lead to deeper learning and will the range of students who engage with game-making be wide or narrow?

Judy and Catherin’s suggestion that I join one of the MGiS teacher workshops seemed a good opportunity to experience the project at first hand and maybe answer some of these questions.

The workshop was extremely well organised and created a professional atmosphere in which the teachers felt they were ‘valued’ and being offered a high quality training experience. The course was well structured and the content was very comprehensive. I especially liked the way that the course was embedded in the broader context of professional development, learning theory etc., but without detracting from the core tasks of understanding how to use the software in the classroom.

A particularly valuable activity was meeting a teacher (and 19 of her students) who had been part of the first training cohort. The students and teacher were convincing advocates for the MGiS model. It was clear that the approach had done much to enthuse and engage them. Generally, the students reported that MGiS had changed their approach to story-telling and this was supported by the teacher who reported that students had been motivated to write much more, and more creatively, in essays. The only real criticism seemed to be that some students would prefer a more modern game environment. The teacher had ‘no buts’ about the MGiS approach.

Participating in the workshop allowed me to understand how the software works and to appreciate the flexibility and power of the MGiS model when engaging students. The participating teachers were very impressed with the course and the potential of the project. MGiS is clearly an excellent opportunity for cross-curricular working in schools.

The ‘hidden questions’ in the project (does a games making approach increase student’s logical and computational thinking skills) will only be answered once the in-school phase of the project is completed and all the feedback and evaluation is completed. If MGiS delivers evidence that game making has a positive effect across disciplines (benefitting both literacy and computing skills) this will support the argument for more gaming (and more cross-curricular working) in schools.

*MGiS is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of their Public Engagement programme. Each project funded under this programme is allocated a mentor to support and advise the project team.

Best practice in computing teaching award

2010-03-09T12:05:32+00:00

Do you know an inspiring computing teacher? Would you like to see them get recognition for their work?

This is the launch of an exciting new award for excellence in computing teaching, aimed at Scottish Computing and Information Systems teachers. The award is sponsored by Adventi and Rewire and will be presented at the conference for computing educators at Heriot-Watt University on June 11th. The special prize is an opportunity for the teacher and his/her class to learn how to develop iPhone applications - training courses and Apple hardware will be provided.

Applications are via a 5 minute video explaining about the teachers' work and can be submitted at the website http://www.communitycounts.com/forum/?id=ComputingBP .

For futher details, Download CompetitiondraftV3.0.

How to assess computational thinking?

2010-03-03T16:55:38+00:00

[cross posted from CACM blog and own blog]

You have probably come across some viewpoint articles about computational thinking in CACM in recent years (Guzdial, 2008, Wing, 2006). Computational thinking is the seductive notion that ways of solving problems like a computer scientist should be taught to kids early on, like reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. What’s not to like about that idea? No doubt every discipline is fond of its methods and approaches and feels everyone in the general population who know about them.

It’s a potentially useful idea for my current project Making Games in Schools, which is training teachers to work with game making software in their classes. The idea is that kids learn important computing concepts while making their games, and so that participation in the project should make learners more positive to CS and improve their understanding of such concepts. But how do you measure this? At the start of the project, I thought: “Great. I’ll just borrow from the material which is amassing in the CS Education community about computational thinking and use it as a pre/post test measurement.” It turns out that the community isn’t quite at that stage yet. It seems we’re still discussing what the concept of computational thinking might include in detail, and therefore haven’t got as far as defining an assessment (if I’m wrong about this, I would be delighted if you would let me know!) I did have to find some way of measuring the kids’ knowledge of CS concepts, so here’s what I did.

Our colleagues at Sussex University (http://www.flipproject.org.uk/) have been working on a sister project to ours, and started thinking about how computational thinking and a visual programming language for game making might be related (Howland et al., 2009). Keiron Nicholson had the brain wave that perhaps you could assess some aspects of understanding of CS concepts by asking children to play a specially prepared game and then answer questions about it. Their team developed a pilot game which could be used as a design tool to find out how children expressed programming constructs in natural language. In our project, we needed a test which could be administered to hundreds of children and easily marked, so we developed another version of this game and matching multiple choice questions. We now have a pre and post test of matching difficulty (I hope!) and have piloted it for a couple of iterations with children and teachers. The test is aimed at 11-12 year olds.

Based on the curriculum guidelines in Scotland, and what I have read about computational thinking, the test covers:

Identifying rules describing complete sequences of actions in the right order
Identifying conditions and consequences (IF and ELSE)
Simple operators such as AND, OR and NOT
Tracking variable state: reasoning about what events previously in the game have led to the current outcome
Abstraction/ categorisation (see below)

Below is a screen shot from an example encounter.

The player meets The Guardian of the Well, who asks her to investigate why some of her animals are being poisoned when they drink from the well. A sequence of creatures are seen to come and drink at the well, and either choke and die or continue to gambol around happily. The chickens and imps die, whereas the spiders and the pigs survive. A feature of the creature’s morphology determines its fate which you can see from watching the video (I am not giving away the answer here!). A number of questions relate to this encounter, an example of which is below.

Essentially, they are intended to assess whether the viewer can identify rules which govern the behaviour of members of different classes and then extrapolate from these rules. It could be taken as a measure of ability to identify inheritance relationships, and to abstract away from the concrete to the more general.

After pilot testing, we decided to create a video of the game for the class to view rather than getting individual kids to play the game for themselves. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it is because you can’t guarantee that the kids will play the game in the fashion intended and this means that everyone could have a different experience on which to base their test answers. For example, if a kid skipped a conversation or took a wrong turning, it could affect their score unfairly. We also found that the test was far too easy (average score 75%!) so I spent a contorted weekend trying to think of the most devious distracters I could which would match with different sorts of misconceptions. Our latest panel of teachers reckon that their classes should find the current version challenging.

There are of course limitations to this approach. Are we really measuring computational thinking? This is such a broad concept that it is almost impossible to say. It is measuring some aspects of it which are easiest to define. Does it rely too heavily on English language skills such as reading comprehension? Perhaps, but we hope that enabling the learners to view a visual representation of the encounters should cut reliance on reading. Further, their teachers will read the questions out loud and answer vocabulary queries for the class. Is the multiple choice style of the questions appropriate? It could measure learners’ abilities to identify rules but not their ability to produce them. The problem is, of course, that learners at the beginning of their computing careers have no representation system for expressing rules apart from natural language, and in the Sussex group’s pilot project they found it tremendously hard. They are not used to using ordinary language to express concepts concisely and comprehensively but they have no alternative formalism at this stage.

You can see videos of the games and the question here and here.

If you are interested in this area, please do take a look and let me know what you think. I expect another couple of iterations will be required to get it right so expert opinions and very valuable. If you can think of more questions or encounters (particularly harder ones) I would be very grateful. My head is spinning from trying to think of them!

GUZDIAL, M. 2008. Education<br />Paving the way for computational thinking. Commun. ACM, 51, 25-27.

HOWLAND, K., GOOD, J. & NICHOLSON, K. 2009. Language-based support for computational thinking. Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). IEEE Computer Society.

WING, J. M. 2006. Computational thinking. Commun. ACM, 49, 33-35.