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

Of Course! course design board game

An educational board game I’ve been working on for over a year has finally gone into ‘production’.

Of Course! was designed to solve a problem I have with new course teams designing a new programme (especially for online courses). Normally it would take 3-4 meetings to get all staff to forget their normal teaching/admin processes, and focus on the new market/student base/subject needs. I designed a simple board game which matches materials, pedagogic, assessment and administrative elements to the learner and market context, adding in competition, scoring and a small ‘vindictive’ element. The game, although the rules needed streamlining, worked wonders in that it generated huge levels of discussion within the course team, and helped focus the team together within an hour – rather than those 3-4 meetings.

After several prototypes and playtests with other course teams, instructional designers and games designers (thanks to my ALT-GLSIG colleagues) I looked for ways to produce the final version. I came across the rather wonderful gamecrafter.com – which allows you to create professional finished board games in single or small numbers as well as large. The downside proved to be the postage (both cost and time, as the package spent a long time in UK customs) but the finished product is rather wonderful and well worth the wait.

You can find out more about the game, and download or purchase it on the Of Course! page; you can also read more about the design process, contextual games, and playtesting of this game in the following paper:

Moseley, A. (2010) “Back two spaces, and roll again: the use of games-based activities to quickly set authentic contexts”. Proceedings of ECGBL 2010, the 4th European Conference on Games Based Learning, Copenhagen, Denmark, 20-21 October 2010, pp. 270-279. Available: http://hdl.handle.net/2381/9103 [Accessed 29/8/2012].

Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching

My first book, co-edited with Nicola Whitton, and co-authored  with esteemed games research colleagues across the UK and US, has just been published!

We set out to produce a clear, usable guide for anyone involved in teaching (whether teachers, lecturers or trainers) who is interested in the benefits of using games and game design elements within their sessions or courses, but lack the knowledge/availability of suitable games or technical ability to create their own: the chapters therefore cover design and effective integration within curricular elements. To this end, we also interviewed ten experts, drawn from the games design industry (including Jesse Schell, Jacob Habgood, Richard Bartle, Nikki Pugh and others), and the book features tips and advice from them throughout.

For a limited time, Routledge are offering 20% off the price of the book on their own site: use code AC2012 and the link:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415897723/

Note: to get free postage on the Routledge site you need to spend over £30 – but you can add other books from their huge selection at the same discount to take it over this threshold. Why not add Nic’s earlier book Learning with Digital Games, to get a good gaming pair?

It’s also available through Amazon, including a Kindle edition:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Using-Enhance-Learning-Teaching-ebook/dp/B00872FSGO/

Brighton Peer group – ALTGLSIG Meeting 24-25th May

Twice a year, the Association for Learning Technology’s Special Interest Group on Games and Learning (ALTGLSIG) meet for 24 hours of planning, writing, playing, designing and socialisation. This year, our May meeting took place (fittingly, given the sudden blazing sunshine) at the beach, hosted at the University of Brighton by Katie Piatt.

To add to the fun, our designated hotel was the rather fabulous (if slightly scary) Hotel Pelirocco. Most of us escaped the more risqué rooms (I was in the fabulous Rough Trade room: a replica of my teenage bedroom, complete with record player and LPs) although Andy Walsh (the librarian of the group) came close with his Austin Powers-style Russian Vodka room and pink-cusion-laden bed.

The event itself was a thoroughly engaging range of activities. We were launched straight into a murder mystery game, devised by Katie for local police training, which culminated in a mad scramble for a ringing telephone somewhere in the large meeting room. Katie outlined the problems she’d encountered engaging the police with the task, yet she’d had much better success with other groups – we launched into a big discussion about contexts and suitability for different types of game with different audiences.

Simon teases out the secret cache as Katie and Sam provide a shield against passing eyes

After some rather tasty biscuits, it was time to try our hand at the world of geotagging/geocaching. Under remote instruction from Becka Colley (University of Bradford), we set out armed with smart phones into sunny Brighton to find (successfully) two secret caches; and ponder the application of geocaching, and particularly the ‘scavanger hunt’ approach of sending teams around several sites of interest to collect each new co-ordinate, in induction for first year undergraduates (sending students around the campus, library, or local town).

Our core aim for the meeting was to define and shape the key approach/structure of the white paper we are writing on Games for Adult Learning, and we spent several fruitful hours mapping this out. Our plan is to have this ready by September, and produce a number of easy-access formats (data sheets, short animations etc.) for those wanting a quick or easy overview.

The evening was spent on the seafront, playing the excellent and almost unique collaborative board game Forbidden Island and a couple of rounds of Bananagrams whilst munching fish’n'chips and planning other outreach events. Perfect.

The following morning we helped Sam Ingleson (University of Salford) playtest her clever student induction game, which combines a board, cards and discussion activites to help give students an overview of what their first term holds in store (both academically and in life).

A quick round-up of SIG business later, and the fellowship departed in various directions from Brighton station, brains still buzzing from almost 24 hours of fascinating and fun-filled activity.

No Risk Strategy

Over the Christmas break I’ve been catching up with some of the games news from the latter end of 2011 – and Risk Legacy caught my eye, as it did when I first heard about the idea. Finally release just before Christmas in the US, this new version of Risk changes the nature of boardgames in a rather exciting way. Up until now, every time you open a boardgame the scene is set to zero: the board and pieces begin at the start just as they did in the previous game (unless you have small children who ‘modify’ the contents in their own unique way). But the designers of Risk Legacy played on the idea that – in reality – battles, feuds and alliances will be remembered by regular players each time a new game is played, and might therefore influence gameplay in a continuum, rather than a constant restart (there’s an interesting interview with the game’s designers in The Escapist).

The new version of Risk therefore comes with stickers, special rules, secret pockets and other tricks which make permanent changes to the game. If you make  a choice between two cards, for example, the other card is destroyed. Literally (from the rulebook: ”If a card is DESTROYED, it is removed from the game permanently. Rip it up. Throw it in the trash.”). Other changes affect the board or the rules permanently – and they come into play when certain conditions are met, such as ‘open the first time a faction is eliminated from the game’. Plus, deliciously intriguingly, one envelope secured to the box base labelled ‘Do not open. Ever’.

Winners in the game get to create special conditions in the following game (such as founding a new major city) whilst losers also carry certain conditions into their next game too. All of this means that the game becomes a campaign, rather than a  one-off scenario, where player actions affect not only the current game, but will have repercussions for future games too.

This innovative approach is not for everyone, of course – many players (particularly beginners) like boardgames precisely because they can write off a poor loss by starting a new game afresh, each game providing a fixed structure for developing a beginner’s gameplay: an essential time-honoured learning curve.  And some who like the aesthetics of board games will be appalled at the idea of destroying or defacing cards or boards – designer Lewis Pulsipher has attacked this aspect of Risk Legacy. It is also pretty obvious that you need regular players to get the most out of Risk Legacy – a game-loving family, or games group. But all this aside, the idea and possibilities are fascinating both for future boardgames, and for education.

The traditional method of learning a boardgame, outlined above, carries a number of similarities with the way we tend to teach courses in higher education: we tend to explain complex subject concepts in the same way each year to new students, and (particularly in practical subjects) rely on the students to practice those concepts with real-world examples or conditions: multiple case-studies or assignments giving students a new chance in each case to develop and consolidate their understanding. The problems with this approach tend to be at the start, when students with a range of background experience are taught key concepts in the same way and at the same level; differential understanding then leads through to poorer or greater application of the knowledge in later exercises or assignments.

Experiential education tries to solve this problem by designing the teaching and learning around students’ existing knowledge, so that each student is learning on their own trajectory: it is, however, difficult and time-consuming to achieve – particularly with large numbers of students. The approach used in Risk Legacy might, though, be of interest here: the idea that students carry knowledge and decisions between each learning module, case study or assignment – and the modules or assignments themselves actually change based on those ‘carried forward’ conditions. Educational methods such as ipsative assessment (see Hughes, Okumoto & Crawford 2010) already utilise this approach, but are not widespread and suffer from the same problems of scalability for large student numbers. Maybe more scalable approaches could be used which allow students to carry conditions and effects through a number of case studies or exercises though, leaving assessments largely unchanged but altering the conditions and learning paths each student takes to their goal. In effect, turning discrete learning scenarios into a longer-term learning campaign.

ECGBL 2011: Athens

In the weeks leading up to the fifth European Conference for Games Based Learning, participants from around the globe were checking the news sites for updates on the situation in Athens. The organisers (Sue and Elaine from ACI) did a wonderful job keeping everyone up to date as the days approached, and set up a travel discussion for those wishing to share lifts from the airport on strike days.

I slowly watched many of the authors in my own mini-track on Games on  a Budget pull out due to cancelled flights (including Nic Whitton, the co-chair, although more due to safety/mobility issues given the imminent arrival of Little Whitton #2); but as I met up for conference drinks at the hotel reception on Wednesday eve, it was good to see that around 80 attendees had managed to avoid any strikes and help contribute to the local economy. Before that I’d spent the day with German experiential education expert Jule Hildmann and her partner, avoiding the police barricades and explosions from the central square; touring around the (closed) ancient sites before climbing a hill to hit a layer of tear gas and splutter back down again.

Konkkaronkka

The first day of the conference had been compressed to cover missing sessions, but I was pleased to chair a near-full mini-track. The focus was on low-cost or traditional-influenced games, and the track opened with a paper by Nic Whitton on the possibilities and affordances such games present to education, and the call for more studies into this timely area (given shrinking budgets across education and heightened by the local economic crisis). I presented my work on Of Course! - the course design board game and its ability to set up a detailed context using simple games-based tricks. A beautiful, cute board game for nursery-age children in Finland with learning difficulties, Konkkaronkka, was presented by Päivi Marjanen who described how the game encouraged peer learning amongst playtesting sessions. The key to this very successful game was the close work between tutors/carers and the game designers at the start; and the extensive playtesting with the target audience; a digital version was created, but in testing it was found that the children talked to the computer and not to each other, so this development was stopped.

The horse & fountain game

In the wider conference, other low cost/simple games were in evidence too: a fascinating activity presented by Ivar Männamaa (University of Tartu, Estonia) which distilled the complex and difficult issue of cultural integration into a metaphor of horses and watering holes. Using home-made, brightly coloured hexagons (fountains) and half-hexagons (horses) students have to position their horses to occupy a portion of the fountains; another team’s horses can then  choose to share or overtake some or all of the fountains. A simple but clever scoring system and rules mimic aspects of cultural integration, and initial tests have proved very effective in generating discussion around the issue which spirals out from the activity. A good example of the generation of complex contexts and ideas with simple game elements.

Other papers of interest included Io Iacovides (PhD student with the Open University) who presented her initial study of breakdowns and contradictions during gameplay: a breakdown being a short term problem or issue, with contradictions being wider problems which go against the context of the game or the needs of the player. Using special study rooms which could track player reactions, Io looked at eight game players and non-game-players in detail. In her paper and the ensuing discussion, the usefulness of these concepts in looking at engagement were considered: breakdowns (if accompanied with breakthroughs) might in fact be more engaging over time, whereas contradictions might cause a dramatic loss in engagement. Eleni Timplalexi (Athens University) described a live action roleplay for high school chemistry students, where groups ‘time travelled’ between two rooms: one a Renaissance alchemy lab where the source and properties of materials could be investigated; and the other a modern chemistry lab where the knowledge of materials could be put into practice to make useful compounds and products. Nikolaos Avouris gave an accomplished keynote on Friday morning overviewing the use of games within Museum education: highlighting the overuse of ‘games overlaid on a weak subject link’, but focussing on the growing use of pervasive games and games with a social connection such as Pheon and Ghost of a Chance at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

As usual for this conference, the long discussion time in and between papers, and the willingness to talk (and eat, and drink) long into the night, meant that I returned with many more ideas, links and new contacts than I could cope with. Athens itself provided contrasting memories: from the sublime remains on the Acropolis and surprising us whenever we turned a corner from tourist tat to stunning remains; to the hair-raising run through narrow streets to avoid protestors and police bombarding each other with water, gas and masonry. But the abiding memory will be of a set of wonderful international friends who took it all on board in a playful way, and ensured we all learned from the experience.

Gratuitous shot of the Parthenon

Museums at Play

A shiny and rather playful new book dropped on my doormat this morning: Museums at Play, the latest in MuseumsEtc.’s quick-to-press up to date publications for the museum sector.

I contributed a chapter on the use of pervasive or alternate reality games (ARGs)  in museums, drawing on a very interesting interview with Georgina Goodlander about her work at the LUCE foundation on the two ARGs Pheon and Ghosts of a Chance; and the work Juliette Culver did with Bletchley Park on our charity ARG for Cancer Research UK, Operation:Sleeper Cell. I strongly feel that ARGs provide a compelling approach to museum education, due to their low-tech and cheap budget (yet highly engaging) nature. Hopefully my chapter will encourage other museums to try this out.

The rest of the (mammoth, and expertly woven together by editor Katy Beale) book has an incredible variety of theoretical and practical approaches, case studies, and thought pieces. They cover game approaches from simple card games and treasure hunts, to multiple actor staged events and high-end digital installations; with many involving the museum audience in co-creation or collaborative outputs.

It’ll take a while to read through them all, but I challenge any museum education officer not to be inspired by at least one approach.