GLSIG May 2013 – Huddersfield

For our latest face-to-face meeting of the Games and Learning Special Interest Group (GLSIG) we made our way north to the beautiful town of Huddersfield, to be welcomed by a very generous Andy Walsh as host at the town’s University.

With ten members present (and others joining in online through the live-blogging we debuted this year), we launched straight in over lunch to playtest a new card-and-description game I’m designing for the Engaging Visitors Through Play event at the end of May. That event is for museum professionals, and my aim was to teach them about simple contextual games through a simple contextual game involving curating a group of artefacts. The play test was incredibly helpful, simplifying my overly-complex rules and producing a much leaner game.

We then launched into the main session of the afternoon – new member Simon Grey (University of Hull) setting up four Raspberry Pi’s and launching Minecraft on each of them. Simon uses this set-up to teach basic programming skills to his students, and he took us through the method. Many of us had some background in programming in the dim and distant past, and we found ourselves learning loops, if-else statements and functions in Python, whilst seeing the results in technicolour lego blocks within Minecraft. It was a highly engaging way to learn (programme-see a reward) and we followed our practical test with a good discussion about this method and its potential, over some magnificent cake.

We finished the first afternoon with a deep delve into games and learning theory, Nic Whitton leading us through a structured set of themes to crowdsource our collective knowledge of work in the field. This proved to be a highly useful, thought provoking task for all, and neatly finished off our aim to mix theory and practice in all GLSIG activity.

One of the strange beasts overlooking our table

For the now-traditional evening games, drinks and deep conversations, Andy led us to a quite remarkable pub (The Grove – more real ales and mythological stuffed-creatures-on-shields than you could shake a jackalope at). We played some weird and wonderful independent card games (We Didn’t Playtest This At All, Zombie Dice and Diggity) – all interesting in their own way, with Diggity taking the most time to work out a strategic approach to – and shared our knowledge of (and played through a few too many) drinking games.

Friday morning saw us shake off any wooly heads with my and Nic’s Game Design Workshop (a 60-120 minute fast-paced game creation experience which we’ve now run successfully for a wide range of participants) – our two teams coming up with a pair of highly original games within the space of 50 minutes. We then merged with online GLSIG members to discuss potential ways to free up time and gain funds for research and practice in the field: whether small local practice, or bigger inter-institution projects. In the process, we resurrected the SIG’s parked Ninja Badges project and set it back in motion for the coming year. SIG business then rounded off the 24-hours, and we all set off happily back to our various corners of the UK.

Deep in game design mode

Another excellent event, and one which mixed theory and practice particularly well: giving us all tangible things to take away and implement, in addition to new theoretical avenues to explore. Special thanks go to Andy and the University of Huddersfield for being fine hosts, and to all the GLSIG members who played active and playful roles.

Pervasive Learning Activities – Workshop July 11th

UPDATE: Date change to July 11th 2013

Pervasive Learning Activities (PLAs) are deeply embedded games-based approaches to learning which draw from key features of alternate reality games, and play on the idea of suspension of disbelief amongst participants: students become part of a developing scenario, learning skills and approaches in context, and gradually blur the line between the scenario and real life.

This approach has been used successfully to teach Enterprise in the Universities of Portsmouth and Leeds, and has potential for any other discipline.

As part of our ongoing research and practice in this area, Simon Brookes, Sarah Underwood and I are holding a workshop to outline the concept of PLAs, give participants experience of a real PLA, and then cover the skills needed to develop one in any discipline. It will be no surprise to hear that the day will be action-packed, fun and (we hope) rewarding.

The PLA Workshop is being arranged in conjunction with the Higher Education Academy, and will take place on Thursday 11th July at the University of Leicester.

Info / Sign up here

Mathletics: 1+1=1.5

My daughter’s school recently ran a month-long trial of the “next generation in online Math learning platform” – Mathletics (http://www.mathletics.com).

It’s a site which aims to augment maths teaching/practice for children from 4 to 13. Its ‘next generation’ label comes from the online and gaming aspects which “students love”. I sat down with my daughter to find out how she responded to it.

On logging in, the first thing she did was create an avatar, and choose a character to guide her through the site (so far so good). She then started work on two challenges set by the school: nothing new here – just a series of maths questions with an answer box (just as you might see on paper) – on a right answer, a tick; on a wrong answer, a cross: no feedback or hints on approaches. To complete the challenge, all ten questions have to be answered correctly; any errors, and the whole ten questions (same ones, in order) have to be attempted again.

As a result, she soon got frustrated and gave up on these challenges, then spent a good 30 minutes changing hair, backgrounds, colours etc. on her avatar (the avatar area takes tips from Moshi Monsters et al, and inherits something of the same engagement level). No maths learning here though.

The one redeeming ‘next generation’ feature is a live challenge mode, where you can play against other students from around the world. On starting, you are assigned three other competitors, and a countdown clock starts, as mental maths questions appear on screen: the aim being to answer more than your competitors in the time available. This certainly attracted both of us, but within seconds frustration was back, as all three of the competitors stormed ahead (easily beating our combined efforts): there is no obvious option to filter competitors to different age ranges or skill levels to provide a challenge, rather than an impossible task.

All in all, Mathletics is a poor example of gamification - applying apparently ‘motivating’ aspects of games and playful activities (in this case, the use of customisable avatars and competitive aspects with avatar-rewards) to what is essentially a very traditional try-and-repeat approach to teaching. The gaming aspects add nothing to the experience other than temporarily diverting (and non-learning) activities around the edges.

Settlers of Calton – ALTGLSIG Meeting Nov 2012

Edinburgh has long been one of my favourite cities, and so we were delighted when Fiona Littleton and Hamish Macleod from the University of Edinburgh offered to host the Autumn meeting of our ALT Games and Learning special interest group (ALTGLSIG). In addition to the fine venue, we also had the largest turn-out of members for a live event: 12 in person on 15-16th November, with another 4 joining us for an online session on Friday morning.

Through their MSc in E-learning, and its Digital Games Based Learning strand, Fiona and Hamish have long experience of using virtual worlds for teaching and learning, and so our first afternoon began by creating characters and exploring the first few levels of World of Warcraft in small parties. I’d played WoW once before for a week or two before it became utterly massive, so it was interesting to see how scaffolding/tutorials and group work were in the present version. We each had an experienced player next to us (drawn from some of our own members, like Fiona, Hamish and Michelle Hoyle who researches WoW, and Clara O’Shea – a research student at the University who is looking at social kinds within the game). Following the various missions in-game (mostly involving killing X beasties)  Clara and Michelle presented their research topics, and this opened to a fascinating discussion around scaffolding, tutorials, roles, stereotypes, the types of learning opportunity present in WoW, and – most interesting of all – the transference of in-game skills to real world contexts.

Playing Setters of Catan

For the evening Fiona had booked tables at the fabulous Southern Bar (complete with wide range of local and bottled ales, and later revealed to be an early drinking haunt for a just-legal Nic Whitton) and friends who each brought a copy of Settlers of Catan. We had soon supped and were gathered in three groups intent on gathering resources and trading cunningly in this compelling group game. Although great to play in a group, I’ve found this game a little irritating over time, mainly down to its largely random element and limit to creativity as the game goes on (you can often find yourself waiting 3-4 turns for something to go your way) – and we continued this discussion the following morning, praising the collaborative elements in the game, but discussing this lack of agency at times. In learning as well as game design, a sense that you have agency – or the ability to create/influence your own outcomes – has been linked to engagement.

Friday morning continued with the shaping of the SIG’s white paper on games and learning, and planning dissemination strategies. We then took part in an excellent interactive overview of the use of badges to signify achievements, from Juliette Culver of the Open University. Juliette demonstrated the (surprisingly easy) process of creating and getting badges approved with Mozilla Open Badges, and then led into a discussion around the usefulness of this system, and the reputation aspects of such badges. There is the crucial question  of authority behind any of the current schemes to create a ‘skills and experience backpack’ which employees might offer to employers in addition to formal qualifications: with badges so easy to create, and so many already created for anything from frivolous activities through to the completion of a 6-week course, how are employers to judge the reliability and relative value of such awards? One route might be through approval by authority-giving institutions (such as universities), but this would detract from the idea of badges as independent, flexible awards which transcend the need for costly academic or commercial approval.

A presentation from a business angle was next, with Anja-Karina Pahl (The Prizm Game Co., Bath) describing her ideas for an ambitious massive-scale alternate reality game to teach scouts and guides about innovation and enterprise skills. Although out of scope for the SIG (relating to child, not adult, learners) it was interesting to discuss the use of gamification and full game techniques for learning in a business setting. After lunch, we finished with an outreach event, inviting other members of the University of Edinburgh who were interested in the use or study of games to join us. Nic and myself cooked up a quick game to encourage sharing of ideas and knowledge (involving classic computer game characters, points, sabotage and – of course – prizes), and we heard a range of interesting research and development topics from the wider group. A fascinating end to what had been a surprising, thoughtful and thoroughly enjoyable 24 hours.

 

Experiential Education, Augsburg 2012

As part of an interesting collaborative research theme I’ve been exploring with experiential educator Jule Hildmann (Train the Trainer) around the links between ‘initiative games’ in experiential education, and the development of deep context in games for education, we co-authored a paper for the Internationaler Kongress für erleben und lernen (International conference for experiential learning), Augsburg, Germany, 28-29 September 2012.

Jule has developed an idea called ‘Simple Things’ which gives trainers simple tools to develop, structure, run and reflect on initiative games, in order to achieve learning objectives. Initiative games are often used in experiential education, and might be as simple as building the tallest tower with blocks – through to complex team challenges such as getting everyone safely across a fast-moving stream. Jule’s approach, and one which chimes with my own research, is to use metaphor around such activities, structuring them so that they reflect real situations, surroundings and challenges from participants’ own contexts. So crossing the river is not simply a group challenge: the river might be a strong weakness which the team are keen to overcome in real life, and the opposite shore the new direction they want to take.

We ran a 3-hour workshop around the exploration of these themes in Augsburg, in both German and English. By asking the participants to play a couple of short initiative games, and then apply metaphor to the games for their own context (which they visualised in some impressive plasticine and pipecleaner models), we encouraged participants to develop activities with the learning context in mind, rather than applying outcomes to preset activities.

The workshop was a great success, and encouraged us to continue our conjoined research in this area: look out for more work in the future. The remainder of the conference was interesting to me as something of an outsider to the field, and allowed space for a lot of reflection on how approaches and features might move from the predominantly outdoor/active space of experiential education, to the more formal classroom or online spaces in HE.

Augsburg, one of South Germany’s oldest towns

Call for articles: Engagement, Games/Simulations and Learning

Together with Nicola Whitton, Manchester Metropolitan University, we are guest editing a special issue of Simulation & Gaming on the important theme of Engagement, Simulation/Gaming and Learning.

We are seeking submissions from a range of viewpoints and theoretical bases, using a variety of research methods and approaches, as well as articles that provide a practical perspective grounded in research.  We hope that this symposium will offer a holistic and critical analysis of engagement – as well as related ideas such as motivation, commitment, immersion and flow – and an evaluation of its relevance and value in the sphere of educational game and simulation design, implementation and debriefing.

We encourage a variety of different types of articles related to engagement, simulation/gaming and learning, including topics such as:

• engagement theory from different disciplinary perspectives
• the relationship between engagement, games and learning
• factors influencing levels of engagement with games and simulations
• case studies evidencing engagement in games and simulations
• ways in which to evaluate and measure engagement
• engagement in reflection and debriefing with games and simulations

The full call for articles can be downloaded here (pdf).

New journal article: An Alternate Reality for Education?

A paper in which I revisit the research I conducted into the most engaged players in the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Perplex City has just been published in the International Journal of Games Based Learning (IJGBL), Vol. 2, Issue 3, pp32-50.

The paper takes a fuller look at the data I presented at ALT-C in 2008, and – drawing on more recent research into ARGs since – reaffirms the seven key features I feel can be transferred to higher education to improve engagement with learning:

• Problem solving at varying levels (graded challenge)
  - enable students to pick their own starting level and work up from there
• Progress and rewards (leaderboard, grand prize)
  - this could also be assessment
• Narrative devices (characters/plot/story)
  - doesn’t have to be fictional: academic subjects have histories, themes, news etc.
• Influence on outcomes
  - as researchers we don’t think that we are working towards a known answer or statement; and we would like our students to think in the same way: by letting them decide or influence some aspects of their course, this helps to scaffold their path into a critical academic thinker
• Regular delivery of new problems/events
  - key to maintaining engagement. Thinking about ways to keep things moving without putting extra pressure on staff
• Potential for large, active community
  …which is self-supporting/scaffolding – the potential is less the smaller the group and the narrower the subject interest/specialisation.
• Based on simple, existing technologies/media
  - rather than high-end simulations or graphics

If you can’t access the journal article from your institution, you can get the gist of the paper from the 2008 conference paper in Publications, and I hope to be able to provide the new full paper here in due course.