Learning Science Meets Game Design

This is Serious Game Design!

2009-04-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

Take it how you like; high quality game design or designing what's known as serious games. The truth is that it's both. I'll admit to being blinded by the math and science game designs that have come far more easily to mind than this kind of game design, but I know when I find quality work. It makes me want to design. Take a look for yourself at this blog post about Brenda's deep game design. That's something that doesn't just educate, it helps you learn and understand.

These are the kinds of things I look for as an artist. Yes, this is being written as an artist, not an educator, designer or anything else. Just reading about her designs and their results brings back the itch to create. I listen to the group Celtic Woman and I want to play music, sing songs and write poetry. It brings back the desire to learn, grow, push myself and most of all to create something worth the effort of creating and consuming repeatedly.

There is an art to game design and teaching that is easily lost even to the masters if they're not careful. Facts are not enough. Even video isn't enough. Let people live the history, the wonder. Yes there are topics like math and science that seem fairly cut and dry, but why not link that knowledge and those skills into the social and historical situations?

The inspiration for Brenda's design direction was teacher her daughter about the slave trade. The numbers from the school lessons distanced the tragedy from the here and now. "So she did what any game designer worth her salt would do: She made a game out of it." - http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/conferences/tgc_2009/6021-TGC-2009-How-a-Board-Game-Can-Make-You-Cry

'Brathwaite assembled a collection of tiny wooden figures, then had her daughter group them into "families." After her daughter was finished, she picked them up by the handful and placed them on a makeshift boat. Her daughter was confused: Why would she take the parents but leave the baby? Why wouldn't brothers stay with their sisters? "No one wants to go," Brathwaite explained. That's when it started to click.

Then Brathwaite devised a primitive resource management mechanic. It took 10 turns for the boat to cross the Atlantic. The boat had 30 units of food. Each turn, the player had to roll a d6, and reduce their food stores by that number. By the trip's halfway point, it was clear to her daughter that her "cargo" wouldn't make it. It wasn't a "fun" game by any means, but it served a different purpose: It helped her daughter intuitively understand the emotional experience of the slave trade, a lesson that numbers on a chalkboard couldn't provide.

At that point, Brathwaite was hooked.' - http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/conferences/tgc_2009/6021-TGC-2009-How-a-Board-Game-Can-Make-You-Cry

For years I've heard people saying why video games are so bad for society. I'll grant that constantly repeating violent behaviors in a way that encourages mindless slaughter is going to desensitize people. After all, look at the news and television. Their content keeps getting worse and worse, like the video games that are following suit, but that's not all video games.

Sometimes we need to be shown atrocities. We need to know they exist. When good becomes commonplace without bad, good looses its meaning. If you don't know its bad, you aren't likely to fix it. If we aren't shown the humanity of those around us, their needs, desires, faults and contributions, it becomes easy to dehumanize them in our minds. Just because somebody is different doesn't mean you are better than they are or that they are a lower form of life.

We also need to be shown hope. How about a follow-up game for the slave trade that covers the Underground Railroad? National Geographic has tried their hands at an Underground Railroad interactive experience. There is a path that leads out of such pits of despair, but usually you have to dig it yourself. That's the truth we need to share, and the fact that it can be done by those with little or nothing to start with except dedication. How about a Sims game that deals with raising public awareness of problems and community organizing?

With a couple simple mechanics Brenda brought the history to life for her daughter, and it's possible to duplicate it. One of the most repeated questions about school topics is when that knowledge will be useful in life, so why not use interactive models to shown them. In military campaigns there are a lot of logistics to be dealt with. I've seriously heard of people having trouble counting change while running a cash register. Make the problem real and interactive. Don't just tell students how it might be useful, show them.

Have fun, spread the word and tell me what you think,
Igen Oukan

EB Blogging Event Topic Ideas

2009-04-25T10:46:00.001-07:00

I'd like to get some feedback on the topics to be discussed, so I'll share the ideas I have and I'd love to get feedback on them. Not much more to say, so here's the list.

1) Multi modal and path learning
2) Redundancy; Good and Bad
3) Personality Types and Learning Styles
4) Effective Digital Communication
5) Social Support Structures
6) Good Resource Design
7) Openness in Engagement
8) Teacher:Student Ratio
9) Motivating Learners
10) Education, Politics & Religion
11) Assessment
12) Creativity, Fear and Critical Thinking

That's the list I have right now in the order the ideas came to me. With what's there and adding in a couple weeks extended discussion, that seems like enough to go for three months. Maybe some could be merged into a single topic. Maybe some should be dropped for the first event. This is to be an open event, so your input is valued.

Okay, I asked for input so I'll inform you about what I think each of these topics cover.

1) Multi Modal and Path Learning

Multi-modal learning is fairly well known so far as I know, but multi-path doesn't seem to be. Multi-modal has to do with tools and form of and for instruction. The path you take to get to the goal is different. For instance in math some people understand geometry better than algebra. For those people it might be better to use geometry to help teach them algebra. That's supporting different paths.

2) Redundancy: Good and Bad

Sometimes redundancy is good, and sometimes bad. Whether it is in teaching, systems, resources, requirements, behaviors or other aspects of education and learning, we should understand where it helps and hinders to improve our contributions to improving the process and results.

3) Personality Types and Learning Styles

Learning styles comes up in discussions and I think we should look a little farther than just preferred ways of learning as learning styles. By looking into personality analysis results like from the MBTI you can help the student to better grasp their strengths and weaknesses in learning. As an INTJ I "get" concepts very quickly, but as a drawback I also get bored with simple ideas quickly. So, if I pay attention to different ways of analyzing behavior and personality, I can improve my results as a student.

However there are problems to be considered as well. Most people look at the results of "tests" as definitive, when in truth these kind of "tests" really just hive a starting point. From there you can start learning about other personality types and identifying similarities and differences. You can also find that sometimes you behave like a different personality "type" than what the "test" results say you are.

4) Effective Digital Communication

Yes, there is a lot to say about effective communication, but as people using digital communications and trying to get those unfamiliar with them to use them, we need to share our experience and wisdom about these channels of communication. This goes hand in hand with the different kinds of media literacy. Learning to effectively use a new medium is learning to apply a new form of literacy.

5) Social Support Structures

Community and social learning have been brought up a lot recently as a big part of a new/older style of education and learning. Supporting the individual, group and institutions in dealing with social learning and supporting social learning is easier if you understand the value of the social support structures evident in social learning solutions.

6) Good Resource Design

This is what I started with in my idea as a response to bad and so-so resource designs. Concerns, ideas and effects of good resource design are all valuable parts of the conversations that help us design better resources. Solutions to prevented option overload while still giving a good variety of resources will be important as we move towards having a massive number of options for almost anything. That's just one example. Compatibility, licenses, formats and availability are all generic possible subtopics to consider.

7) Openness in Engagement

There's been a lot of discussion on open education and learning, but the common problem is that in using the new tools people do the same old things. Even the idea of a walled garden can be used beneficially if you have openness in the garden with options to take things into and out of the garden. Involvement, engagement; learners given the chance to do, and take the opportunity, learn more most of the time. The point is to have the the openness in the options available to those in and outside the walled gardens. Suggesting class activities, co-designing experiments and such may be limited to the class, but they are examples of openness in engagement. While openness in sharing is the usual direction people focus on, this is just as important, if not more so. Why? Well, openness in engagement can lead to openness in sharing, because people like to share cool and interesting things they've seen and/or done.

8) Teacher:Student Ratio

I'm not just talking about the number of students in a class, but rather starting there. How might we help teachers help more students? Better, smarter resources? Peer aided learning? Maybe there are solutions in qualified volunteers and combining different partial solutions. Communities have their breakdown points based on networking, as does the one to many model of teaching. Let's see what can be done.

9) Motivating Learners

Educational games have been claimed as helping to motivate learners, but I don't think that approach will be enough. Even in games there are other motivating factors to be considered, so there is plenty out there to help motivate learners.

10) Education, Politics & Religion

Learning, order and beliefs play a part in all three, and those three influence each other. How they do in different scenarios will affect the educational and learning systems, whether we account for them or not.

11) Assessment

With all these cool new tools and broader view of talent, assessment has plenty of ground to cover. How much and when does effort count? Accuracy, memory, creativity, analysis, skills and more can and should count at times. When and how much are just as important as having ways to assess them.

12) Creativity, Fear and Critical Thinking

These three things are connected. To encourage creativity, fear and critical thinking usually need to be dealt with. How to encourage and deal with these is a part of good teaching.

Some of these may just be a reorganizing of similar content and concepts, but it's the variety of views that makes this valuable. If you can look at the same thing from many points of view, you can get a better understanding of it. That in turn helps you make informed decisions.

Have fun, spread the word and tell me what you think,
Igen Oukan

Designing Systems For Sharing

2009-04-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I came across somebody voicing a view I've held for a while; systems and features help shape community behavior. Normally that is called emergent behavior (indirect results) and social engineering (direct act to get results). I find it interesting as a topic of game design. Thus, I find it interesting as a topic for designing learning environments and communities.

So, sharing is a behavior that can be designed into systems and features. Attribution, citation and quotation all go hand-in-hand for this. All three are preferred behaviors in a sharing culture and correspond to rewards, open connections and actions. Put them together with some technology and you might get what I'll refer to as an ODSCS ( Open Distributed Social Content System ). Please note the lack of management in that acronym. Applied to learning it could be called a Social LCMS.

I've been working on a similar post and decided this should be it's own post after reading Jim Groom's response to a comment of mine. Those are in the comment's of Articulating the Bus post at Bavatuesdays, related to the Mozilla Open Education Course.

Attribution

Attribution works as a built-in, self-balancing reward system. You did it, so you should get credit for it, be it good or bad. Being an open system, I do expect people to lie, cheat and steal, but some call me cynical. Fortunately there are ways to counteract those less desirable behaviors.

Basicly, it's a matter of digital identity and branding. While you should be on the look out, you can make it obvious which things are official via an official website. If it links back to a copy on the official website it's official.

Citation

Citation is how the attribution actually counts. By linking back to the official version and giving the correct information about the authors, the readers have plenty of information to work with. They can find out how authentic and new the resource is. They can find out who writes materials they like and don't like.

You can become known for creating resources, finding resources and/or sharing resources. All these need citation to really take off. After all, somebody needs to tell others about your greatness. That's verbal citation.

Quotation

Quotation is how your resources are shared. Attribution is the rewards and citation the connections, but neither is worth much if nobody talks about the resources. That's where quotation comes in. Even paraphrasing with links is a form of quotation with citation. Another name would be sharing, the act of sharing.

If you can make quotation with accurate citation easy, you've accomplished something great. That's how you get people into sharing. Better than that it's sharing and creating connections with a built-in, self regulating reward system. There are rewards for sharing and creating resources, and the tools to share them, but not much in the line of compatibility and ease.

Ease

Yes, I just said that those tools out there are not easy to use. Why? Most don't give growth paths. Tutorials are talk that will be forgotten. Videos aren't much good either. You need action. For instance, it would be cool to have a quotation add-on or plug-in for browsers and programs. Highlight, quote and have all the citation information, meta-data, there for easy use. Unknown works as an answer.

What kind of growth path was that? It's a sharing growth path. A button at the bottom of a blog post or wiki page that reads, "Quote Me!" or something would be a good start. It's done in BBforums to get people to make quoting within the system easier, but what about a web-quote button?

SODT

Standardized Open Distributed Technologies could be the answer. It's possible to use things like YAML and XML for quotes and cross-platform compatibility. That's the kind of thing that would make a syndication based design possible and easy to use. That's an option for creating systems and programs that are designed to help people share.

Syndication is a beautiful tool for these efforts, because it is a way for different technologies, programs and platforms to communicate in an automated fashion. The same discussion becomes visible in multiple locations on the web for multiple communities. It could also be possible to create a program, browser expansion, service and/or webpage that is just for the conversations on the web that you're interested in and those that you're a part of. Hopefully you're interested in the conversations you're a part of. More on this later.

ODSCS

This is the type of technology an ODSCS would have to be to really work the way I'd like it to. Personally, I have three details to the concept I'd like to have in the design; an open distributed wiki behavior, a file and file system organization scheme and a small & open back-end implementation. Here's why.

I want an open distributed wiki behavior. First this is for collaboration, cooperation and sharing. Each source of resources in the system then can point to each other and pull from each other. Second, this allows for branding and quality assurance. Identity and integrity can be maintained while still giving access to a greater collection of resources. Third, there isn't a dependence on a single, central repository of knowledge. If Wikipedia went down, it'd be bad. This idea is naturally redundant and creates back-ups of itself through emergent social behaviors, kinda like Lenix.

I want to use files and file system organization rather than a "program". First, this doesn't require downloading a program, because the tools can be online. Second, all your data is easily navigable in it's natural format. Third, if YAML, or something similarly easy to read is used, the content could just be saved and used as is without a special viewing software. Fourth, people could create an organized set of notes, lists, resources etc for themselves using the same tools. Fifth, a file system design is compatible with the internet, because the internet uses the files systems of servers. I know this because of my studies and helping set up sites.

I want it to be a small, open back-end thing. This is the KISS ( Keep It Stupid Simple ) version of the things that will come of it. ( Just to reiterate, it's "Stupid Simple", not "simple, Stupid". The first is very simple, while the other is simple and insulting. ) Many people have made variants on Lenix from the basic version years ago that came from Unix. That's the kind of community development I would like to see.

The point of the Open Distributed Social Content System is to make the resource collections interoperable and able to cooperate with each other for the benefit of all. Companies want to share how their products can be used. Consumers want to find solutions to their needs and wants. Others try to bring those people together. That's in the business world. Then there are things like education, communities and other directions such a content system could be helpful in.

The why is pretty obvious to me, but that's because I've been looking at this stuff for a while.

Blog/Wiki/Forum

Here are some interesting and related things I've found:

http://onepresscommunity.com/
http://bavatuesdays.com/new-digs-for-umw-blogs-or-an-anatomy-of-a-redesign/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wiki-page-links/
http://www.cynapse.com/products/cynin/editions/open-source-community-edition
http://bodington.org/

At the moment it seems like mixing OnePress with WordPress Wiki functionality would give the best of the Blog/Wiki/Forum capabilities at the least effort. I used to think it would be a forum base that would be the easiest, but I haven't seen the progression towwards the merger in forum design that I've seen in Blog design. I've posted about this idea a few times ( Forum Wiki Concept and Open Communication Platform ) and still think it is the big direction to go when it comes to this stuff. Only now I've got another thing to add to the picture, distributed. I'll get to why this is so cool after going over the blog/wiki/forum concept.

If you think about it, the blog and forum match almost perfectly. Starting a thread is the same as posting a blog post. In the comments, discussions happen in response to the initial post. Tags and subforums are very similar, though tags are more flexible. Well, what if you could have a blog post and it's comment feed in an organized forum structure for you're own access to the discussions going on? Maybe create a redirection and syndication based interaction format?

Then there is the wiki to mix into the idea. Each "comment" and "thread post" could be compared to a version of a wiki page. Then there is the category way of organizing wiki pages, which is very similar to what I would consider a combination of subfuroms and tags.

So, what does the distributed concept add to this? First is the multiple views of communication being realized in functional design. The individual only looks at certain parts of the whole set of communication. Some of it they just look at, while other parts are continually watched. The group view is the combination of the actions and views of the many individuals, which you normally see on the social sites. Simply put, that's a built-in personalized interface that works the same as subscribing to forum threads and being e-mailed when new comments are made on a blog post.

Second, distributed structures are not dependent on the central structure, but work together like a community, or team, of structures. So, if any particular structure goes down the rest are still stable and functional.

Third, distributed structures encourage smaller groups to participate. Creating your own version of resources and resources for your own use are ways that the individual and small group might use a structure that allows such behavior. Now think about sites like W3Schools.com. They have a lot of materials that could be useful for walkthroughs and tutorials, but how do you access the information right now? The answer is links. That's nice for a blog post with quotes, but it could be easier to use. As one of many resources with it's pieces nicely quotable, and repurposible, those making the guides and tutorials can quote W3Schools and create a public resource with their name(s) on it. It then isn't just a webpage, but also usable in a webpage or service.

Fourth, this might be easily done using syndication-based architecture. Here are some posts on that interesting direction.
http://bavatuesdays.com/syndication-oriented-architecture-or-a-feed-frenzied-framework/
http://bavatuesdays.com/achilles-heel-of-the-syndication-bus/
http://ericschnell.blogspot.com/2008/01/syndication-oriented-architecture-synoa.html
http://etutorials.org/Misc/rss/Chapter+2.+Content-Syndication+Architecture/
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/09/11/a-conversation-with-rohit-khare-about-syndication-oriented-architecture/

More

Here are a few links that might be interesting to those who have read this far.

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=48531
http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2009/04/06/the-design-with-intent-toolkit/
http://blog.igenoukan.com/2008/12/designing-classroom-game-support-system.html
http://blog.igenoukan.com/2008/11/sharing-inside-and-outside-classroom.html
http://blog.igenoukan.com/2008/11/loosely-connected-to-who.html

Have fun, spread the word and tell me what you think,
Igen Oukan

Mozilla Open Education Course is GO!

2009-03-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

The course will be starting up this Thursday, April 2nd. Hopefully I'll be on time for the I was one of several people to sign up for Mozilla's Open Education Course. Well, they announced their selection of participants, and I'm one of the chosen few. (Always fun to say. :P ) More specific, I am one of six participants that are classified as having "Web 2.0 Mash-up" projects.

To keep up to date with my participation in the course, I'll share the feed for the posts. Hopefully it works.
Feed URL: http://blog.igenoukan.com/feeds/posts/default/-/MozOpenEdCourse
Hashtag: #MozOpenEdCourse

So this is perhaps not as open as it could be, but it is very open and accommodating. The limited number of official participants seems like the students who are getting credit for an open course. Since the seminars, wiki and blogs posts are open to the public in different ways, it makes sense. I think live attendance to the seminars and some other benefits are limited to the official participants. That's fine to me, because they are limiting their promises. Everything else is extra.

I'm looking forward to this as a way to learn and make contacts. As I said, I'm one of six who's projects are classified as "Web 2.0 mash-ups", so there are five others doing similar stuff. Then there are the others who are participating in this course. If things go really well, I might get some people interested in working with me. A few old servers, some knowledgeable help and connections would make accomplishing my ideas a whole lot easier.

For more information on this course you can head over to the Mozilla wiki. The participants, outline and description are all there.

Have fun, spread the word and tell me what you think,
Igen Oukan