Game Design Boot Camp this Summer at MIT

Learning Games Network is a non-profit spinoff of MIT’s Education Arcade. This summer on the MIT campus, they are hosting the 2012 Game Design Boot Camp for teachers and students.

While the Learning Games Network is committed to developing and distributing educational games based on research, the boot camp will be similar to a game jam combined with professional development. Here’s some text from their site describing the week’s activities:

A select group of teachers will work with teams of middle and high school students where each student will be assigned specific roles and responsibilities building on existing skills and interests as they are encouraged to develop new ones. Using the Game Design Tool Kit, teachers will guide their groups through the process of game design from the inception of an idea to the strategic and creative applications that turn a concept into a playable paper game prototype.

The camp offers teachers the opportunity to develop their abilities using a proven teaching method that encourages effective and collaborative relationships while giving them the mechanisms for engaging and energizing students in the development of creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking skills. Teachers completing the Boot Camp will receive a Professional Development certificate from the MIT Education Arcade. Students with a strong interest in game design will learn everything from basic conceptual skills to advanced strategizing and will leave the camp with the knowledge needed to begin developing their own video games.

It looks like a fabulous opportunity for teachers and students interested in videogames, game design, careers in the industry, or application in the classroom.

Educational Games Research on Twitter and the #gamestudy Hashtag

Lots of items cross the transom that never make it into a blog post. Mostly this is due to time limitations. Twitter offers a way to share many of these items, and provides me a personal resource that can be tapped later, as well. Thus, the launch of my Twitter feed @edugamres

Items that are directly related to gaming research will be tagged with #gamestudy. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll be happy to follow back.

Call for Submissions: 10th Annual Game Developers Conference Online

The 10th Annual Game Developers Conference Online in Austin, TX has an open call for submissions:

The call for submissions to present lectures, panels, full day tutorials and roundtable sessions at the 2012 Game Developers Conference® Online (GDC Online) is open now through midnight PT on Wednesday, May 2. The tenth annual edition of the conference is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, and will take place over three days, October 9-11, 2012 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX.

GDC Online focuses on development of connected games including social network titles, free-to-play web games, kid-friendly online titles, large-scale MMOs, and beyond. Submissions should address the most pressing development challenges for online and connected games with submissions related to the following tracks: Business & Marketing, Design, Customer Experience, Production and Programming.

The deadline is May 2. Additional info is available at gdconline.com.

Teaching Difficult Concepts Through Videogames

As mentioned earlier, I’m honored to have been invited to a conference held by the Center for Children and Technology last week. The title of the conference was Making Games That Teach Difficult Concepts, and it brought together game designers and academics to discuss issues perplexing to both.

We broke into small groups to focus on games for middle school science, middle school social studies, and early childhood. I was in the social studies group, admirably led by Bill Tally at CCT, where among other things he is the PI for evaluation studies of Mission US, a history game focusing on revolutionary America.

One of the challenges of history games we mulled over is the question of game mechanics. As I’ve opined elsewhere, good game mechanics involve key learning elements. The classic example is traditional dominoes, which requires players to count by fives in order to succeed, making it a great game for teaching basic arithmetic to children.

In history games, though, the primary learning dynamic often takes place through text. Narrative action is thus often the key mechanic in which learning takes place. This led to much discussion regarding the problem of compelling game play, with fascinating insights from participants such as Bert Snow, lead designer and VP at Muzzy Lane, and Tracy Fullerton over at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

Conferences such as this one are important in bringing together multiple perspectives. Knowledge and understanding gleaned from these discussions further preparations for research and development of future educational games. My thanks to all the good people at CCT who made this conference possible.

What Can Angry Birds Teach us About … ? At the Forefront of Angry Birds Research

With over a billion downloads, Angry Birds is the most popular casual gaming app of all time, so it’s only natural for social scientists to investigate it. Here’s the results of some recent items I found while searching for what educators and others have been researching about the game.

David Kelly, blogging at Misadventures in Learning, notes design elements in Angry Birds spark positive influences for skill acquisition. Players can jump right in with little to no learning curve, follow multiple paths to success, and are offered incentives toward productivity. Its initial platform design assists in simple productivity as well:

One of the reasons Angry Birds is as successful as it is is its accessibility.  Unlike console video games, Angry Birds was designed for mobile devices. It has no tether restricting where it can be played and was in fact designed for mobile phones, a device many people have with them throughout the day.

In addition, the level structure of Angry Birds is packaged in small chunks.  An attempt at a level can be completed in less than 30 seconds.  It’s the perfect design for mobility.

Pertti Saariluoma, Editor-in-Chief of Human Technology, noted the games’ designers professed they have no idea why the game is successful. Indeed, Saariluoma notes, good game and software design often is intuitive rather than proscribed.

Market research firm AYTM.com offered up a handy infographic showing demographics and other data from the game. Interesting nuggets include: a total of 53% of players use the free version with the majority occasionally feeling “addicted” while playing. The firm noted Michael Chorost’s article in Psychology Today listing the “addictive” elements of the game. These include simplicity, reward, and realistically simulated physics. Dr. Chorost speculates a dopamine burst may be released, making the gaming experience a pleasurable one for players. As far as using Angry Birds in the classroom, Dan MacIsaac over at SUNY-Buffalo State notes that Google returns over a million hits for “physics teaching Angry Birds.”

Mobile apps in general are receiving scrutiny from researchers, and Angry Birds is often mentioned since it’s the most popular game. Matthias Böhmer over at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Brent Hecht, a PhD. student at Northwestern, and their colleagues released a large scale study of mobile app use at Mobile HCI 2011 in Stockholm. They found users spend about an hour a day on their phones, but only about a minute at a time with mobile apps. News apps were found to be more popular in the morning, while gaming apps are more popular in the evening:

Weather checking is, not surprisingly, largely a morning activity, as is the checking of one’s calendar. On the other hand, users’ desire to fling Angry Birds at pigs is absent in the morning, and only picks up in the early afternoon and into the evening. Kindle usage behavior is even more focused in the late evening.

Angry Birds and other popular mobile games will probably continue receiving attention from researchers, with efforts likely to include discerning design details that can be adapted to more educational endeavors, as well as a continued commitment to incorporating the game itself into academics. Research always lags pop culture. By the time several thorough studies of Angry Birds are published, if any ever are, the game will likely have faded in popularity and been replaced by the next new thing.

RPG Accomplishments are the New Boyscout Badges

My 6 year old proudly showed me a new accomplishment on Wizard 101: “Junior Archeologist.” It reminded me of when World of Warcraft added “The Explorer” accomplishment for characters who had “explored” the game’s content. Several players created new characters called Dora so they could earn the sobriquet “Dora the Explorer” on their realms.

Another thought: it reminded me of Cub Scout and Boy Scout days, diligently working toward merit badges. Nowadays, it seems videogame accomplishments are the new merit badges.

It some ways, that’s probably a good thing.

What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies now on Kindle

Earlier this year I mentioned the book What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media, edited by Scott McLeod and Chris Lehmann, is coming out in October. I am honored to have written the chapter on educational gaming.

I recently learned the electronic version is available now. So, if you have a Kindle, or a Kindle app installed on your phone or computer, you can download the book right now from Amazon.

Ambermush Roleplaying Game Helped Launch Careers of Bestselling Authors

A rising tide raises all ships, or so the saying goes. It also encapsulates a teaching philosophy found in many educational games, in which repeated exposure to common elements is said to increase participants’ related skills. Thus, a literacy game will require players to read. The more they read, the better their reading skills develop. While seemingly sound and plausible, the theory is hard to quantify.

In a recent article in The New York Times, an old online game called Ambermush is credited with launching the careers of at least a dozen writers. Amber is the name of a classic fantasy series by Roger Zelazny. In the books, reality originates at Amber, and all permutations and variations on reality in the multiverse spread out from there. In Ambermush, an online game discontinued in 2009, players wrote scenarios and engaged in group writing fantasy exercises loosely based on the series.

Jim Butcher is the best selling author of the Dresden Files series of fantasy novels. He credits Amber with improving his writing.

With no graphics, Amber was a world made of words. For aspiring writers, as Mr. Butcher was back then, that was very enticing.

He recalled the old writers’ adage that “you’ve got to write your million words” of bad prose “before you’re writing good stuff, and I once estimated that I was writing 5,000 words a day, mushing,” he said. “We were all practicing storytelling every day.”

… Mr. Butcher is not the only author to come out of the Amber community: by some estimates, a dozen or more of the hundreds of former players have gone on to become published authors. Playing Amber then was like attending a writers’ colony, but without the brie and posturing.

The game served as a learning community, a practice area for aspiring writers, a sandbox where they could flex their creative muscles, and a place for honest (sometimes brutal) criticism. Beyond that, friendships formed in-game led to lasting social networks outside the game, as like-minded people scaled the publishing mountain in the real world.

It may be hard to quantify, but there’s little doubt Ambermush was a successful educational game for future bestselling authors.

References:
Schwartz, J. (2011, September 24). A game that honed the skills of writers. The New York Times, C1.

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Corporate Research: iPads are Used Mostly for Recreational Purposes

A Citigroup online survey of 1800 people in the US, UK, and China found iPad users engaged with the device primarily for entertainment purposes. Web surfing, e-mail, and watching Netflix top the list. Users in the US were more likely to buy the device as a secondary unit for fun, or as a toy, while users in China were more likely to consider the iPad a primary computing device for serious work. More, including charts, here and here.

Using Video Games to Solve Complex Problems

The blogosphere and the Twitterverse were buzzing today with news about the latest crowdsourcing coup, where a video game was used to unravel the molecular structure of viral enzymes that cause AIDS in monkeys.

Such tedious work often requires human cognitive abilities, and combined efforts seem to flourish within a gaming environment. The online game used is called Foldit, and Firas Khatib and Frank DiMaio over at University of Washington’s Dept. of Biochemistry along with several others published a paper in Nature detailing the effort, entitled Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Here is their abstract:

Following the failure of a wide range of attempts to solve the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease by molecular replacement, we challenged players of the protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the protein. Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination. The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs.

The game looks quite interesting, and by playing you might help make a significant contribution to science.

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