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.

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.

 

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).

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.

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

Meeple in the Pub: or The Games and Learning SIG is launched

At the last ALT-C conference, Nic Whitton and myself floated the idea of a Games and Learning special interest group (SIG) with the powers that be; to be greeted with much enthusiasm.

Fast forward three months, and a group of researchers and practitioners within higher and further education who all shared an interest in the use of games within learning (either directly, or indirectly through research) met together in a first SIG online meeting. And there was much rejoicing.

Between then and now, we’ve been working on a variety of projects to consolidate our approaches and develop new research and outreach; including creating a web site and membership scheme to allow anyone interested in the area (games for adult learning) to join in. We are pleased to announce that this is now open to all:

• About the GL-SIG (and how to join)

What about the pub?

The first challenge: open the Lego packets

Last week, the core members of the SIG met for the first of what we aim to be six-monthly ‘face to face’ events. I hosted at the University of Leicester, and we spent a fabulous 24-hours (including a sleep and university catering-supplied bacon butties) packing in a whole host of work including, but not limited to:

• competing in a lego-building ‘contextual’ challenge
  

  Make my day, punk

• setting out the aims and structure of a planned white paper on games and learning
• discussing Aaron Dignan’s Game Frame (see Nic’s thoughts here, which matched the discussion pretty well)
• pooling research ideas and opportunities
• playing and critiquing my course design board game (very useful feedback) and  decamping in the evening for beer and some highly competitive games of Carcassonne, Ruk Shuk and Pass the Pigs.

Playing the course design boardgame

Long live the GL-SIG!

Games on a budget

ECGBL 2011 will be held in Athens this year (Oct 20-21), and myself and Nic Whitton are running the following track within it:

Across the world, education is being hit hard by funding and quality crises, with increasing pressure to increase student achievement with decreasing resources. The feasibility of game-based learning can be limited by the cost of design, development or purchase. We welcome papers to this stream which focus on case studies and theoretical proposals for game-based methods which will be cheap and effective enough to be persuasive choices in this environment.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• The development of games cheaply (including simple games, non/low-digital games, alternative reality games, simple/mixed media etc)
• Using game-based techniques in traditional teaching
• Theories and methods for efficient design and integration of games into the curriculum
• Case studies of successful, efficient and economical game-based learning
• Examples of low-cost technological solutions for game development

For submission details, see the call for papers page.

Come and join us in discussing the role of games in the future of higher education; the conference is a good discursive one too, with plenty of opportunity for international networking.

 

ECGBL 2009, Graz: Games and Learning

One of many traditional watering holes

On behalf of my co-authors, I set off to Graz (on a plane, for the first time in years and since the security increases: give me the Eurostar any day) to present our paper on Motivation in Alternative Reality Games (Moseley, Whitton, Culver, Piatt) at the 3rd European Conference for Games Based Learning (ECGBL).

After having followed tweets from the 2nd ECGBL in Barcelona last year, I was keen to find out whether the conference lived up to its hype, and was rather bowled over. First impressions, however, were not so wonderful – with the advertised twitter tag #ECGBL rather useless to the band of twitterers due to no wifi or connection within the main building – and a very sparse attendence (40 or so for the opening plenary).

That soon changed though: a comprehensive overview of research into games in education by Liz Boyle set us on our way, closely followed by my paper (which went down a treat – literally, with my generous distribution of gummi-bears: the idea being that the person at the very back would be motivated to stay at least until the bag reached them). The Prezi for our paper is here: http://prezi.com/snzgvgwrwtzh/ – paper itself to follow shortly.

Sharing my session were two great siblings who were to share many beers with me over the coming three days: Jule and Hanno Hildmann provided a microcosm of the spread across the whole conference: Jule discussing the use of outdoor activity games to engage under-privileged students; and Hanno musing on the use of mobile devices for assessment.

This set the scene for the remaining two days, with sessions varying from board or mind games through to Second Life and 3D graphics-rich commercial quality games. What was remarkable was the level of pedagogic and learning knowledge base for a huge slice of the papers: most games had been designed with a need in mind, and solved it with considerable skill.

Nathalie Charlier's First Aid Game

I’ll describe three papers which I found fascinating. The first, from Nathalie Charlier, demonstrated an ingenious and beautiful hand-crafted board game she had designed to assess First Aid training – although the game could be won by clever strategy, the assessment scores were based on knowledge which was peer-assessed throughout the game: hence allowing 40 students to be assessed without any teacher intervention.
The second was a paper by Warwick PhD student Wee Hoe Tan, which I chaired: this was interesting in that it used a commercial game (Spore) to support an A-level Biology course, but deep learning occurred not within the game itself, but in the discussions around the use and information in the game by the students and tutors – this led to an interesting discussion in the room, and suggests that even poorly linked off-the-shelf games (which Spore was not, I should note) could be used as catalysts for high quality learning.
Thirdly, the paper by Fiona Littleton and Hamish Macleod from Edinburgh provided a fascinating window into their MSc course in eLearning, which immerses their students in Second Life, World of Warcraft etc. From discussions I’d had with Hamish and Fiona over dinner, I knew how forward thinking this course is, and the audience again provided a good prolonged discussion of the various merits of the games platforms and whether technology in itself is a key factor, or if the benefits are more related to roles, personalities, memorable events etc.

Graz itself is a very beautiful (in an austere way) small city, with a central berg and the new blue heart-shaped kunsthaus dominating the skyline. The conference dinner was held in the latter, and a great time was had by all – as the clock struck midnight, I was able to celebrate my birthday with a hearty international group, fuelled by the local beer and hearty slab-of-meat based dishes.

Tchüss, Graz; and make a note of October 2010, when the ECGBL will move to Copenhagen.