Toy Spy Robots: A Practical Way to Teach Programming

Seymour Papert taught us years ago the most effective way to teach computer programming to children was to make it fun, and MIT’s Logo programming language remains popular (and free). Since then, other languages designed to teach programming concepts have been developed, including Scratch, Game Maker, and Alice. (I wrote an article on educational programming languages for TechEdge that is online here.)

From a commercial standpoint, especially with languages like Logo, the urge to combine programming with real world robotics has been highly successful, most notably with the Lego Mindstorms line of products. Now, a new company has developed a toy spy robot that will encourage the creation and posting of programs by its fans.

The Spy Video TRAKR from Wild Planet Entertainment will blend online and offline fun for budding robotics enthusiasts. Offline, the target market of eight-year-old and older boys can guide the remote controlled vehicle into other rooms and use its wireless camera for surveillance. Taking a tip from Webkinz, which ties an online product with toys in the real world, the Spy Video TRAKR will offer strong inducements to play on their site. Here’s a quote from a recent news article:

Wild Planet says the Trakr goes a step further than other Web-tied toys. It sends children online to create application and then brings them back to the toy, instead of just leaving them playing related games online.

The marketing pitch for this seems brilliant. The toy will function as a spy robot right out of the box, but for the kid who wants more, plenty of customization is offered, whether it’s an app downloaded from the site or one he makes on his own. Here’s part of the press release:

Though the Spy Video TRAKR can be used without ever being hooked up to a computer, tech-minded kids will be quick to connect their toy and start the customization process. Beginners can access an online application modulator that will allow them to modify existing apps as they familiarize themselves with writing code. All the tools they need to write their own unique programs will be available online, for free.

The toy will be available in October, in time for Christmas, and should retail for about $120. I wish the best for Wild Planet, and I hope their new product is highly successful. Also, hopefully, it will encourage many new future programmers to pursue careers in the STEM fields.

References:
Zimmerman, A. (February 10, 2010). I spy a market for kids. The Wall Street Journal, D1.

How to Design an Educational Video Game: Three Important Considerations

I’ve been talking with folks from the foundation affiliated with a Fortune 100 company recently about designing an educational game that would promote some of the foundation’s objectives. The project is in its infancy, so I’m withholding details. But the conversations we had led me to formulate some considerations for any company or individual to seriously consider before designing an educational game from the ground up. Three top considerations should guide the project from its beginnings all the way to the final product.

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1. Playing the game should be educational, rather than simply having educational content inserted into the gaming experience.

Students learn by playing. This is a critical component of good educational games. Allow me to illustrate with a basic example. Traditional dominoes is an excellent game for teaching math skills to children, especially for adding up fives. If a player can make the tail ends of the dominoes add to five or a number divisible by five, he scores points. If not, he may strategize to prevent his opponent from scoring. You can see children mentally adding while playing … three plus two equals five … four plus six equals ten … The game cannot be played without adding up the points on the table, so basic math is an integral part of the game.

Likewise, math, logic and strategy are integral to 42, a version of dominoes on steroids, a trick-taking game similar to hearts. A player must mentally calculate whether or not her hand is capable of winning a bid based on the potential points in her own hand, and a good guess as to the tricks her partner can take.

Rather than having a child solve math problems before advancing to the next level, a good game should simply integrate math within the game play. Considerable research backs up this approach.

Both traditional dominoes and 42 require basic math skills; 42 requires higher reasoning while dominoes requires simple addition. Because these elements are integral to the games, indeed a fundamental part of both games, they reinforce skills and hold high educational value for children. Likewise, a good educational video game should require the exercising of skills in order to successfully play the game.

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2. If looking to increase academic skills, reading and writing should probably be integral to game play.

A rising tide raises all ships, and the more reading and writing a student engages in, the higher his achievement scores potentially climb. Of course, information absorption is integral to any high end video game, especially 3D virtual interactive environments. But when students have to read and process specific information regarding game play, they’ll be absorbing the content you are interested in instilling.

On the other hand, if you are not interested in instilling academic content, say instead life skills or machinery operation, then reading and writing in the game are not as crucial. But if, for example, you are interested in increasing the understanding of Elizabethan English, then reading and writing will be very important.

Some common examples include history games and those in the Civilization series. Sometimes the reading takes place offline, for instance when a student peruses a history book to better understand strategies for winning in Civilization. Other times students read in-game for clues to solve mysteries and puzzles, such as in the old Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Sometimes, especially for the younger set, reading simply is the game. We find this in the old Living Books series, especially the one modeled on Dr. Seuss’ ABC.

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3. The game should be interesting, engaging, and generate excitement for the topic.

There have been studies where academics spent lots of time, money, and effort creating video games that were absolutely educational by every measure. Yet, when kids finally were allowed to sit down and play the games, they found them … boring. These studies are valuable to educational game designers, and their lessons need to be heeded when starting from scratch.

What do players enjoy about games? They like to explore, socialize, rack up achievements and do stuff (mainly killing things, according to Richard Bartle, but the doing stuff can be other things besides killing in an educational game, provided it’s richly interactive). The game needs to be robust enough and engaging enough to meet the needs of its players. Keeping that in mind while designing and producing an educational video game will lead to a satisfying product that students will enjoy playing, and hopefully learn desired content along the way.

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These were the first three things springing to mind when discussing the genesis of a new educational gaming product. If I missed a crucial component in your opinion, drop me a line.

Playing Games on the SMART Table

I’m a big fan of SMART Board’s SMART Technologies, the Canadian company behind one of the leading interactive whiteboards. Warren Buckleitner, the editor of Children’s Technology Review, attended the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s conference, NAEYC 09, where he filmed a nice bit on SMART Technologies’ new SMART Table.

The SMART Table reminds me of the old Ms. PacMan tabletop game of the 1980s, where two players could square off with one another while seated (and yes, I threw far too many quarters down the gullet of one such machine in a College Station eatery way back when).

It also reminds me of Dr. Merrick’s table top computer portrayed in the movie The Island, which was the brain spawn of an MIT consultant for the film.

Various games and activities are included with the SMART Table, including puzzles, mazes, and arithmetic problems embedded in a fun environment. On one, a money game, kids have to slide representations of coins to indicate the cost of an item. Buckleitner asks the SMART rep, jokingly, “So kids could actually gamble and do poker in preschool?” I had to smile since we talked about poker in school earlier today.

Buckleitner seems a bit concerned about the $8,000 price tag for the SMART Table, but if past success is any indicator SMART Technologies will sell plenty of them. Here’s Buckleitner’s video:

Study: Business Simulations Raise Grades for Undergrads

Dr. Richard Blunt over at BX-Games has a non-refereed paper on eLearn Magazine regarding a study of three college classes split into control and experimental groups to examine video game effectiveness for learning. The courses consisted of freshman business students, a junior level economics class, and a junior level management class.

Portions of each class received the intervention while the remainder did not. Grades were compared between the two groups from each class. The introductory business experimental group used the game Industry Giant II, the economics students used Zapitalism, and the management students used Virtual U (a free download thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation). Here is Dr. Blunt’s summary of the results:

The findings show that classes using the game had significantly higher means than those classes that did not use the game. There were no significant differences between male or female scores, regardless of game play, while both genders scored significantly higher with game play than without. There were no significant differences between ethnic groups, while all ethnic groups scored significantly higher with game play. Lastly, students ages 40 and under scored significantly higher with game play, whereas students age 41 and up did not.

In short, the studies found that, at least in some circumstances, the application of serious games significantly increases learning.

The comments section has some interesting conversation, especially regarding business simulations, which have been used in B-schools for at least 50 years or so. One could argue the board game Monopoly is a business simulation, I suppose, and if so that would stretch back their birth date to the 1930s (or much earlier, if conspiracy theorists are correct).

Other than that, the importance of the study is that it seems to show an intervention may lead students to a higher grade, at least in undergraduate business courses. Somebody will need to determine if students who volunteer for interventions such as a business simulation video game would earn a higher grade anyway just because of their own innate study ethics, or if the games serve to encourage slackers to work harder, etc.

References:
Blunt, R. (2009, December 1). Do serious games work? Results from three studies. [Online.] Available: http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=research&article=9-1

One (Ten Dollar) Laptop Per Child? Repurposed NES System Holds the Key

I’m a big fan of the late great Indiana University business professor Richard Farmer. His signature book, Farmer’s Law: Junk In a World of Affluence, should be required reading in business and education schools. Check out one of my articles for Converge Magazine a few years back for more details.

Farmer noted a society’s influence could be gauged by what was thrown away. The more affluent a society, the more valuable its junk. He was an advocate of repurposing equipment and technologies, sending “old” materials to developing countries to help them speed development. This has in fact been occurring for some time to one extent or another. Americans old enough to remember soda pop in returnable bottles might be surprised to find them still in use when visiting third world countries. When a factory in the West modernizes, its obsolete equipment often goes overseas.

Back in the 1970s, when Farmer wrote his book, he suggested a good way to repurpose old vehicles would be to unload them on beaches off India. He speculated the cars would soon be repaired and placed back in good service. Now, it’s hardly fair to call India a third world country anymore. But there are some older technologies still in service there, and this includes gaming consoles once dominant in our marketplace 20 or 30 years ago.

Eric Lai over at PCWorld reports on Derek Lomas, a grad student who stumbled across the old style consoles while on an internship in Bangalore. The system Lomas discovered in the marketplace there is a knock-off of the old Nintendo NES system, an 8 bit console. The system takes NES cartridges and hooks up to television sets. Lomas had the brainy idea of adapting the unit for an über-cheap computer.

This idea makes a lot of sense for developing markets. Most households in developing countries, regardless of socioeconomic status, already have television sets. The monitor in any portable computer system can be the single most expensive component. Therefore, providing just the guts of a computer and using a television as the monitor is simply brilliant, especially for homes with very low incomes.

Lomas documents the discovery in his blog here. Jerry Kronenberg at the Boston Herald reports Lomas participated in the International Design Summit at MIT this month, birthplace of the One Laptop Per Child idea, otherwise known as the “$100 laptop.” Lomas’ team hopes to add memory to the device, a keyboard, and cell phone access for Internet browsing.

Nicholas Negroponte, who spearheaded OLPC at MIT, is another professor who has put big ideas for developing countries into action, like Richard Farmer back in the day. If Lomas is successful, he’ll be following in good footsteps.

References:
Kronenberg, J. (2008, August 4). Designers on quest to build $12 computer. [Online]. Retrieved August 9, 2008 from http://news.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/
view/2008_08_04_Designers_on_quest_to_build__12_computer/

Study: MMORPGs Critical in Developing Tomorrow's Business Leaders

One of the neat things about educational videogames is the vast multitude of angles the research can take. Whether it is military/industrial applications, classroom adaptations, or medical appropriations, videogames can be used and studied in a wide variety of educational settings. Matthew Kirdahy has a nice article over at Sify.com on how playing MMORPGs can lead to enhanced business skills. Kirdahy gives a nod to another article appearing in the May issue of Harvard Business Review that marks the culmination of considerable research on the topic.

The article’s authors, Byron Reeves (Stanford University), Thomas W. Malone (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Tony O’Driscoll (North Carolina State), found that leadership in online games offers a sneak preview of tomorrow’s business world. In fact, they said these games exhibit leadership abilities crucial to the future of business.

Here is the key paragraph from the HBR article regarding the sometimes serendipitous but always interesting findings:

A number of our conclusions about the future of business leadership were unanticipated. For one, individuals you’d never expect to identify—and who’d never expect to be identified—as “high potentials” for real-world management training end up taking on significant leadership roles in games. Even more provocative was our finding that successful leadership in online games has less to do with the attributes of individual leaders than with the game environment, as created by the developer and enhanced by the gamers themselves. Furthermore, some characteristics of that environment—for example, immediate compensation for successful completion of a project with nonmonetary incentives, such as points for commitment and game performance—represent more than mere foreshadowing of how leadership might evolve.

Fortunately, of the article’s authors, Dr. O’Driscoll (now at Duke) has blogged extensively about the research behind the paper. You can find his most recent entry regarding what resulted in the HBR product here. A thorough write-up, with lots of links to articles, podcasts and work leading up to the findings can be found here.

Harvard Business School is no stranger to publishing research on video gaming and business applications. Beck and Wade published Got Game way back in 2004.

References:
Beck, J. C., & Wade, M. (2004). Got game: How the gamer generation is reshaping business forever. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Kirdahy, M. (2008). How online videogames can help groom biz leaders. [Online]. Available: http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14721468

Reeves, B., Malone, T. W., & O’Driscoll, T. (2008, May). Leadership’s online labs. Harvard Business Review. [Online]. Available: http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp;jsessionid=
3FGSKMZGNNJNSAKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?ml_action=get-article&
articleID=R0805C&ml_page=1&ml_subscriber=true

CSTA Publishes Educational Game Programming Article

I opened the mail today to find the latest issue of CSTA Voice, a quarterly for members of the Computer Science Teachers Association. Late last year Dr. Chris Stephenson, Executive Director of CSTA, and Pat Phillips, Editor of CSTA Voice, arranged to reprint my article, “Programmed to Learn.” The article focuses on using Logo, Scratch, and Alice for teaching STEM topics. The article first appeared in TechEdge, the journal of the Texas Computer Education Association. The article will be printed in three parts in CSTA Voice.

The Computer Science Teachers Association is funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Below is the introductory paragraph from their website, explaining their raison d’être:

The Computer Science Teachers Association is a membership organization that supports and promotes the teaching of computer science and other computing disciplines. CSTA provides opportunities for K-12 teachers and students to better understand the computing disciplines and to more successfully prepare themselves to teach and learn.

The first part of my article, appearing in the March 2008 issue of CSTA Voice, focuses on the programming language Logo and the Logo Foundation at MIT.

Amy Jussel, HASTAC, and MIT Press’ Open Access Books in the MacArthur Series

I was familiar with Amy Jussel’s excellent Shaping Youth blog, because she linked to a post of mine on exergaming a while back. Recently, Jussel shook some corporate trees by taking Target to task for some suggestive advertising. Target essentially brushed her off since she’s “just” a blogger, which resulted in a firestorm of criticism from the blogosphere (ouch, bad PR … and negative posts last forever in cyberspace). The New York Times took up her story, resulting in even more bad PR for Target.

Anyway, I was perusing Jussel’s blog when I discovered an entry in which she mentioned the MacArthur Foundation’s new book series with MIT Press. Her entry linked to HASTAC.org, which stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.

The MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning is available through MIT Press in paper format. However, thanks to the foundation’s funding, MIT Press is offering the texts in digital format free. Of most likely interest to readers of this blog will be, The Ecology of Games. Here is the TOC:

Foreword
Mizuko Ito, Cathy Davidson, Henry Jenkins, Carol Lee, Michael Eisenberg, Joanne Weiss
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: vii–ix.

Toward an Ecology of Gaming
Katie Salen
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 1–17.

Part I: Learning Ecologies

Learning and Games
James Paul Gee
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 21–40.

In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives
Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, Laurie McCarthy
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 41–66.

E Is for Everyone: The Case for Inclusive Game Design
Amit Pitaru
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 67–86.

Part II: Hidden Agendas

Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children’s Software
Mizuko Ito
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 89–116.

The Rhetoric of Video Games
Ian Bogost
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 117–139.

The Power of Play: The Portrayal and Performance of Race in Video Games
Anna Everett, S. Craig Watkins
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 141–164.

Part III: Gaming Literacies

Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age
Kurt Squire
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 167–198.

Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming
Jane McGonigal
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 199–227.

Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life
Cory Ondrejka
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 229–251.

Why Johnny Can’t Fly: Treating Games as a Form of Youth Media Within a Youth Development Framework
Barry Joseph
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 253–266.

Glossary
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 267–273.

Games Index
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning: 275–278.

Peer Review a Gaming Text Via Blog; Read a Classic for Free

Noah Waldrip-Fruin is embarking upon a grand experiment this week by having his latest book peer-reviewed via blog. Waldrip-Fruin, over at UC San Diego, is well known in academic gaming circles for co-editing with Pat Harrigan First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media.

As first widely reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education today by Jeff Young, Waldrip-Fruin discussed peer review of his newest book with his editor at MIT Press: Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. What better place than Grand Text Auto, the far-reaching academic blog that Waldrip-Fruin runs along with Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Andrew Stern? And so it is the book will be made available on the blog, in modified format, entered as blog entries to be available for comment by readers. The first excerpt slash blog entry is here.

In related news, Julian Dibbell wrote a book some time back about a text-based online world that predated Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. etc. These text-based multi-user dungeons/domains remained popular into the 1990s. I recall messing around in them on mainframes back in the day (though I was more enamored with the graphical stuff Richard Garriott was producing, I must say). Rumor has it, there remains a small contingent of passionate devotees who sneer at graphical worlds in contempt. Hm.

My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World covers the world of LambdaMOO in the early 1990s. Without getting too technical, a MOO is sort of an advanced MUD, that allowed users opportunities to program the environment. Dibbell’s book delves into topics SL is now grappling with years later in more graphical environs.

This month marks the 9th anniversary of My Tiny Life’s publication. Dibbell recounts his noble idea of placing the work under creative commons licensing, since the publisher let it go out of print. Although the arrangement would mean no royalties for the author, the text might well have enjoyed a renaissance and gained a wider audience.

I was going to announce today that MY TINY LIFE had been liberated — not merely launched anew but born again under a Creative Commons “copyleft” license and thus set loose for any passing amateur to upload, remix, mashup, and otherwise repurpose in all the many fruitful ways that copyright, precisely, fails to permit.

Alas, quirks in copyright law have prevented that, so Dibbell has offered the text as a free download from Lulu.com.

So read an old gaming text for free, and help review a new one. All is possible through the power of the Internet.

Universities Turn to Gaming and Entertainment to Enhance E-Learning

US News & World Report has a nice trio of articles on online learning this week, including one about Dr. Walter Lewin over at MIT, who has created the world’s best online video lecture series on college physics; the increased use of Web 2.0 and gaming apps in online courses; and the increased use of Second Life for educational purposes.

While Dr. Lewin doesn’t use educational videogames per se, he does engage viewers with online lectures that actively illustrate the concepts covered in the lecture. The series ran about $100,000 to produce, and cover Physics 1, 2, and 3 at MIT. All are free to watch by anyone, and Dr. Lewin has garnered international praise for his work. Other professors now use his lectures in their own courses as well.

The SL article is by Lucia Graves, who wrote an article I discussed in October 2007 on dissecting virtual frogs. Graves interviews Jeremy Kemp over at San Jose State’s SLIS, opening the story with an anecdote of students showing up for class in SL as avatars resembling Jell-O or butterflies (no mention was made of the infamous flying phalli SL is sometimes known for).

SL is becoming something of a phenomenon in college online education. Harvard Law opened a course to SL netizens; Princeton owns an island there; and the state of Louisiana is funding a 5 island initiative studying the value of 3-D virtual interactive environments (VIEs) for education. Merrill Johnson over U. New Orleans asserts that even if the hurricane-prone state loses classrooms to disaster, virtual conference rooms can allow classes to continue.

The remainder of the article is devoted to pros and cons of using SL for education. On the pro side:

Educators say Second Life is an effective teaching tool in part because it provides a social laboratory where role-playing, simulations, exploration, and experimentation can be tried out in a relatively risk-free environment. But perhaps the most touted benefit of Second Life is the opportunity it gives students to interact with people around the world—there are users registered from more than 100 countries. It also allows students to visit places that no longer exist, like a townscape reconstructed to look like Elizabethan England in the late 16th century.

On the con side: behavior issues, including griefing, have resulted in Ohio U. shutting its island down after a virtual gunman shot the place up and Woodbury U. permanently closed its island following unabated student misbehavior. Robert Vernon, over at Indiana, is quoted as indicating SL requires a certain level of proficiency to navigate. Peter Ludlow at U. Toronto notes the lack of affordances in the environment negatively impact teaching. This is a point I made in a paper published last year, BTW.

Finally, Kim Clark writes a nice article entitled “New Answers for E-Learning.”

Some professors and schools are redesigning their courses to take advantage of the Web’s interactive and visual possibilities, adopting some bleeding-edge technologies such as gamelike simulations and digital avatars to make online courses more exciting and more effective than traditional classrooms … A growing number of online courses are requiring students to participate in blogs, wikis, or gamelike simulations.

Clark includes a list of university initiatives that focus on these “gamelike simulations”:

Barbara Christe, who teaches biomedical engineering technology at Indiana University-Purdue University- Indianapolis, uses simulations that allow students to scroll over circuit diagrams to see how changes in current affect resistance, for example. Michigan State University has developed a Jeopardy!-like website, packed with quiz questions that science and math students can answer to see how well they’ve mastered key concepts. The University of Maryland-University College has developed a gamelike simulation of a crime scene for students in its criminalistics class. And a growing number of teachers are experimenting with presenting lectures and information as avatars in Second Life.

Although the quiz show study format is an old way to review multiple choice test items, the simulations seem well suited for online format since students aren’t traveling to a physical lab. Open source simulations may be a good way to incorporate these across a wide spectrum of college classes since it seems that good ones would be rather expensive for each university to create. If not open source, perhaps a version developed elsewhere that prevents each university from re-inventing the wheel, something along the lines of the K-12 simulation-type software for math found at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives over at Utah State. Finally, the crime scene simulation sounds like something that might be able to delve into higher order thinking, if done right.

References:
Clark, K. (2008, January 21). A new Physics superstar. US News & World Report, p. 48.

Clark, K. (2008, January 21). New answers for e-learning. US News & World Report, pp. 46-49.

Graves, L. (2008, January 21). A second life for higher ed. US News & World Report, pp. 49-50.