One of the other activities that we have been undertaking has involved the idea of going on a treasure hunt in the Second Life environment. So far, Fiona Littleton has devised two such hunts and has given the players just a brief clue to get them on their way. These being:

1. High above the chapel walls lies the great work of Michelangelo.
2. In an Augustinian garden, play with these laws.

The first one was easy, the Sistine Chapel on Vassar Island. The second was a little harder as it required a little more research outside of Second Life before the treasure hunt could begin; but we would be eventually rewarded once we had worked out that it was Mendel's Garden on Genome Island.

These Second Life treasure hunts had a number of purposes, first of which was to give players the opportunity to become familiar with the Second Life environment; another one, was an opportunity to see the diverse nature of uses, constructs and artefacts within Second Life; finally, there is an opportunity to see how "treasure hunts" in Second Life could be used for creating a learning experience.

One of the of most potent themes to surface from this module is that people like games to have a degree of acceptable challenge-ness, i.e. it shouldn't be too easy and it shouldn't be too hard. The treasure hunt, like the WebQuest, is, for me, an intellectual pursuit to "unlock the puzzle" - it's not about being first or to receive the reward at the end; it is about the "challenge" itself and to succeed in that "challenge" to the best of my abilities - the "challenge" therefore becomes a personal quest to see how well I can perform.

UPDATE - 02.04.2009

The final clue from Fiona is:

1. Find the place where Viola and Sebastian live on

Week 5 of the course saw the teams being given an exercise that involved building a game around the Second Life platform. Team 2 member, Nicholas Palmer, once again, got the ball rolling by providing a useful mind map of the task at hand.

The game was based around the well-worn concept of role playing games (RPG), the format of this type of game is something that I am very familiar during my teenage years as I was an avid player (and sometimes author) of the "Call of Cthulhu" RPG system. Hamish Macleod offered a couple of examples that the teams could use or create something that was of interest to them. Hamish's examples included:

1. An Employment Exit Interview
2. Drama on Drug Action at the Synapse

The team members suggested some ideas that could make a potential RPG. One of my proposals involving a sales pitch by a young team of comedians for an idea of a comedy show to some hard-bitten TV executives was taken by Marie Leadbetter and developed further by basing it upon the BBC TV's "Dragons' Den" format. Marie was kind enough to create a wiki for the team to start fleshing out their ideas. The wiki was broken up into 6 sections:

• Game Description
• Rules
• Characters
• Scenarios
• Platform / Design
• Theory

One of the side-effects of developing this game was that for some of the team, the concept of "Dragons' Den" was not clear to them despite the presence of the rules and links to the BBC show and the Wikipedia article. This suggested to me that we were not using an universal cultural reference point on which to build and, as such, they felt they were not able to make a productive and fruitful contribution to the team project.

One of the issues here, is that teams need to turn around an idea into a fully-fledged "product" within a week. This means that the teams need to "virtually" meet with each other to get the ball rolling. Given that some of the team members are quite geographically and temporally displaced it does mean that they cannot always attend virtual meetings on Skype or Second Life. We can, of course, communicate via the Discussion Boards on WebCT, but again it could sometimes take up to a whole day before a reply is received. Therefore, in order to complete the project, some of the team members will have to "trailblaze" the project forward and having the other team members "piggy back" on when they are able to - this is clearly not an ideal situation as you want team members to have an equitable and democratic experience.

The Dragons' Lair RPG wiki can be accessed here...

Over the last few week on the "Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning" module, we have been given numerous opportunities to look at an assortment of games with a view of developing an insight into how they might help with learning. Not only are we grappling with the nebulous concepts of "play", but also discovering how games could potentially help with the learning process.

One of the outcomes of the module is the opportunity to "play" and make our own connections and synergies between what we experience and that of the games and play literature. The course has offered a number of oppprtunities to play games, such as a treasure hunt in Second Life (I'll have something to say about that in a future post); creating and play games that make use of Google Earth; and developing a role playing game for Second Life (again, a future post will address this). This week is the turn of the WebQuest, which according to Dodge (1995) is:

"...an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing."

I was first introduced to the concept of WebQuest in the "An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning" module and got to experience one in the "Effective Course Design for e-Learning" module, where Stuart Easter developed a WebQuest as part of his Learning Event. Stuart's WebQuest went along the lines of finding a "single phrase" that linked the following "names / words / links":

• Circle Line Party
• Dan Hamill
• A link on Google Earth
• Jane's Addiction
• London Pillow Fight

A quick Wikipedia search, would have you discover that the answer is flash mob. Hamish Macleod began his WebQuest by asking us to "to discover what notion, or phenomenon, links (by inclusion or exclusion) the following words or phrases":

• Alice in Wonderland
• Artificial Intelligence
• A lonely girl
• the Bangalore World University
• viral marketing
• a denial
• Michael Douglas

However, the WebQuest wasn't going to be quite as simple as that as "the solution [was] not merely some potential linkage, but [a] specific linkage that [he had] in mind." which added a whole different complexity to the quest, which I personally relish - it's an intellectual pursuit and a battle of wits and minds that have kept the "little grey cells" of humankind engaged since time immemorial.

In many ways the Wiki Paths: The Great Link Race game works on a similar premise of the WebQuest and is part of a genre of games that involves "cracking codes" and "unlocking puzzles" that are in pursuit of "forbidden knowledge". The new Ron Howard film "Angels and Demons", a prequel to "The Da Vinci Code", is currently supported by an online game making use of Photosynth (which in itself is interesting as I will be using Photosynth for my final module assignment) which requires users to try and find clues and symbols to try and unlock the secrets of the Illuminati and shows how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to build engaging and compelling educational games (and not a single person was killed in making these games).

Note: The answer to Hamish's WebQuest is alternate reality game.

References

Dodge, B. (1995). Some thoughts about Webquests. [online]. Available at: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html [Accessed 6 March 2009].

Reading this week's papers from Pat Kane (2005) amd Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) were a sheer joy and delight compared to the James Newman chapter the other week. I think the issue between these three writers is one of how an argument is being presented to the reader. We start with Sutton-Smith (1997) who sets that scene by explaining that the meaning or definition of "play" is fraught with ambiguity with various philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, etc. describing the essence of "play" in different ways that relate to their particular disciplines.

It's astonishing to learn that for such a "simple" concept of "play", or at least perceived by many to be a "simple" concept, has academics from a multitude of disciplines trying to place "play" within some framework or other - indeed, I don't recall any of the theorists mentioned by Sutton-Smith taking an holistic and all-encompassing view of "play"; this is something that Sutton-Smith (1997, p. 6) sees as a weakness and Kane (2005, p. 40) also picks up on when he talks about the "third culture" or polymathism ("Homo Universalis") before the arts and sciences had a parting of the ways. I was also intrigued by Sutton-Smith's view that play "has temporal diversity as well as spatial diversity" when he talks about the likes of the World Cup and the Olympics. Sutton-Smith (1997, p. 9) offers "seven rhetorics", which Kane (2005, p.39) describes as:

"...ways of thinking and talking about play that express a certain vision of human nature and culture, and which can be deployed by everyone from teachers to generals, hackers to CEOs ... [which] imply both a very modern and a very ancient vision of humanity."

The "seven rhetorics" are:

1. The rhetoric of play as progress
2. The rhetoric of play as fate
3. The rhetoric of play as power
4. The rhetoric of play as identity
5. The rhetoric of play as the imaginary
6. The rhetoric of play as the self
7. The rhetoric of play as frivolous

Kane (2005, p. 48) makes an interesting statement whereby he says "the moment of play is identified as a generator of originality, energy and new development" that made me think of Google's European offices in Zurich and the "Homo Ludens" that occupy it.

 

Kane's "manifesto" is about a lifestyle, an attitude, a state of mind, a way at looking at the world and the people and artifacts in it that strips away the rigidity and drudgery that has been hampered by a mechanistic, industrial mindset of the Victorian age. Education is still built around this hidden curriculum of "preparing people for the workforce".

There's this wonderful allusion to Jean-Dominique Bauby's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" where Kane (2005, p. 46) quotes surrealist Luis Bunuel: "Somewhere between chance and mystery lies the imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom". Bauby suffered a massive stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome (the diving bell) and would use his imagination (the butterfly) to escape his biological prison.

Both Sutton-Smith and Kane position play not as a "trivial, frivolous, silly" waste of time; but as a powerful, natural human asset for learning and discovery through highly creative and imaginative interactions with the world and the people who live in it. Whilst the games industry has shown how people can become immersed in the world of games and are developing skills through experimentation, practice and from other players, so now Education needs to look at this phenomena and translate this into practical, everyday use fit for a classroom be it real or virtual.

Update

Have just learnt that Pat Kane is one half of the late 1980s, early 1990s pop duo Hue and Cry and maintains a blog called "The Play Ethic" and is using Twitter to share his thoughts and resources around his concept of the play ethic.

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kane, P. (2005). The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a different way of living. London: Pan.

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

I've been fortunate enough last weekend to have had a go on some of the different games consoles that are currently out on the market without hemorrhaging my wallet or bank balance. A work colleague has a Nintendo Wii and my partner's brother has a Microsoft Xbox.

The Nintendo Wii (or simply "Wii" as the manufacturer prefers to market it) is currently en vogue at the moment with it's unique wireless controller and nunchuk that acts as pointing devicea that senses positions across 3 dimensional space. I got to try out "Mii Maestro" and "Handbell Harmony" minigames from the Wii Music suite and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. The first thing you notice is that the wireless controller is not as difficult to operate as the dual analog controllersof the Xbox and Playstation games consoles. The second thing you notice is that there is still a degree of eye - hand co-ordination going on (something that I am not particularly good at).

Whilst I am very competitive with board and card games, I have found myself not being quite so competitive with the computer / video games as I have wanted the opportunity to test the features of the software and hardware to try and gain a better understanding how it all fits together especially where my wretched eye - hand co-ordination is concerned. The rather nice thing with the Wii was that there was six of us having a go with it - it's the social aspect of gaming that I have always found appealing and it was nice to see it here again with a computer-based game rather than a board game.

Microsoft's Xbox is a more "traditional" games console that uses the dual analog contollers which takes a little getting use to as each button, toggle and trigger performs different functions that tend to come into play simultaneously - which means hand, eyes and brain need to work together (you really begin to appreciate Prensky's (2001) "digital native" concept at this point). My partner's sons, Josh (10) and Nathan (14), opted for Colin McRae Rally 04, F1 2002 and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The two racing games were very much about eye - hand co-ordination and manoeuvring the cars around the track without crashing them. The game that interested me the most was the Harry Potter game and the situation that arisen from it that reminded me of Gee's (2007) discussion about the social aspect of gaming. Josh is the most dextrous out of myself and Nathan as far as videogaming is concerned and how adroit he is at handling the controls. Josh is well versed with platform games and adventure games.

The Harry Potter games has dozens upon dozens of rooms that contained different types of logical puzzles. Josh would run around in each room like a headless chicken using his wand to smash open boxes, etc whilst completely missing that each room might have a special clue or puzzle that needed solving. This is where Nathan and I would come in to advise / coach / "bossing around" Josh what he needed to do. What struck me was that although neither I nor Nathan had access to the controls we were able to take a full part in the game by collaborating with Josh as to what needed to be done and how to go about it - this for me demonstrated the reflexive and critical elements that Gee (2007) was talking about in terms of learning and understanding along with group collaboration to getting the task completed. Whilst at the beginning Josh was a little irritated by our input, it didn't take long for him to see the value in it as he was able to complete tasks more efficiently and more quickly because the group was working to their strengths to get the tasks done.

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), NCB University Press. 

Firstly you'll need to try and get back into FlashMx after a few weeks of not using it.. the shear amount of stuff you've forgotten is needed as a catalyst for distraction.

Secondly you'll need access to the internet,

Third, have something in the back of you mind that needs sorting out, in the following case it's CAD software for the Mac, at the moment is seems non exsistant.

and lastly have something really cool to do instead.

 

OK. the method..

Get into Flash with the following photos.

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These are two photos of a milling machine as found in a general DT workshop.

the difference between the two photos is that one has the guard down the other up.

Fairly simple and you can see where i'm going with them.. the'll go into flash as another quick fire challeng, "whats wrong" "click it" "next level" type thing

Before they can go into flash, we need to get rid of the crap in the background and replace any white space with a transparent background, called the alpha channel... i think.

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This take about an hour to do the two photo.. quicker if you're organised, infinately long if you're not.

With these two images, open flash and get really confused... realise that you've never done this type of action before and start looking on the net for a solution, find a CAD program that is used for MAC, download it and get a pleasant surprise when you see its a Virtual Lego builder

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spend a few hours building stuff and wonder if there is anyway to up the image quality with lighting dynamics.

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Find that the program you need requires two other programs and a separate utility to expand them both.

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 Get back to Flash when you realise that you're not achieving anything... although now you're thinking of different applications for the newly found software and you want to incorporate it, or at least make a Lego movie

ok so the mill..

eventually found out how to do the action by looking back at my blog and comparing notes to the past scenes I had done.

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Now I'm getting distracted by this blog....

off to play cooking mama

 

 

 

 

Know Your Island

This is the name of the game we have chosen to put forwad as our Google Earth team project.
Its aim is to test the user's geographical knowledge of islands.
However instead of just looking them up on a world map in this exercise you will be given the opportunity to 'fly' along parts of or its entire coastline.
The learning objective is to concentrate on the coastal features as the user will be traveling a predetermined path for about a minute. Certain geographical features such as the extent of agricultural land, rocky coastline, sandy beaches and marshland will provide important clues, as will the degree of habitation (towns/cities) and the presence of ports, bridges or jetties.
The game can be played individually but also as a group, competitively, based on a point score:

Rules
The rules are as follows:
1. Click on the file link at the bottom and play back the flight tour; if you can't work out the island repeat the flight, a maximum of four times
2. If you have not identified the island after the fourth time select the 'Places of Interest', and 'Borders and Lables' option from the Layers feature in GoogleEarth and try to identify the island using the landmark names
3. If you have not been able to identity the island at this stage start 'zooming out', one incremental step at a time until you know its name.
Points awarded as follows:

1. If you recognize the island on the first tour you get 10 points, if you recognize it after the second run you get 8 points, at the third attempt 6 points and at the fourth time you get 4 points.
2. If you need to switch on the landmark layers in order to identify the island you get 2 points
3. If you have to make use of the 'zooming out' option you will get for each incremental 'zooming out' a penalty point, for example if you zoom out one increment and then recognize the island you get get -1 points, if you need to scroll out three increments you score -3
4. Note down the score for each island you identify and move to the next one
5. Total the number of all points during your island hopping to obtain a final score
6. The person with the highest score wins

P.S. Is is recognized that there is a strong local bias within this game hence the choice of islands should be adapted to the nationality/residency of the player. For example local versions of the game may be created for particular countries such as Greece, Spain or Denmark.

Target group: GCSE to A-level Geography students
Below is the example of the first island tour, called Island1. Click on the file to launch GoogleEarth:

island1.kmz  

I chose Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile" - the computer game that is, not the book, film, play, an episode from the TV series or, more recently, a graphic novel that have lent itself to the Christie brand - for two simple reasons:

1. I like murder mysteries and this story is very familiar to me;
2. I wanted a "gentle" re-introduction into computer gaming having been out of it for nearly 20 years. 

So, in many ways, I took the approach that Gee (2007) originally adopted and went for something that would "interest" me. If you look at Berens & Howard's (2001, cited in Newman, 2005, p. 12) gaming genres, this game sat firmly in the platforms and puzzles domain - though I would say more puzzles and less platforms. The game is definately not roleplaying, even though you are playing Hercule Poirot and it's definately not a first-person game.

Let me explain. my idea of a roleplaying game involves interacting with the other characters - you don't do this in the game. Firstly, there are short black-and-white silent movie moments where the characters "talk" via text at the bottom of the screen, in other words there are no spoken words. Secondly, the "interviewing" of the suspects also uses this silent movie approach whereby you click on the "next" button to read the "conversation" that is going on. So immediately the game isn't immersive as you are not acting and interacting, you're just reading text from the screen.

The first-person approach allows you to see through the eyes of the character and allows you to interact with objects and people. What the game does offer is 24 rooms with "hidden objects" that you have to find over 14 scenes. You are given 25 minutes per scene to find the objects that appears on the list of things to find. Some will be clues to the murder and others are just thow-away objects. After each scene, there's a more traditional slider-type puzzle to solve. So the game is promoting keen observation skills and logical thinking. I managed to complete the entire game in one sitting that took about 5 hours to complete.

Although I had successfully completed the game, I didn't feel any sense of satisfaction from completing it as I didn't feel that the game particularly challenged me; this well-known story was rather secondary and somewhat superfluous; the characters were non-existant as if they were devoid of any personality - it would have, I think, be different if the characters were allowed to "talk" so that their "personalities" were able to shine through the words that they "spoke" and the "accents" that they used to speak them. It would seem that I wanted some that went a little beyond the "gentle" re-introduction that I thought I needed. The game wasn't animated enough, it has already been documented that action-based games are more engaging that still-based games, however nice the graphics and music should be.

I should say that a couple of years ago I did buy one of those interactive DVD games that you play on the TV. I purchased Agatha Christie's "After the Funeral" which was intersperse with video clips from the TV show, games and puzzles and linked together by David Suchet playing "Hercule Poirot". Whilst this game is not action-based like the computer game, it had the added bonus of the video clips and David Suchet as Hercule Poirot talking directly at you, which gave the impression that you were in the game rather than outside of it. There is definately something to be said for computer games that have animated action sequences rather than still ones.

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.  

Newman, J. (2004). Videogames. London: Routledge.

Although I have been keeping up with my course readings, writing regular posts into my blog and doing a spot of game creation using Google Earth, this course has given me an opportunity, or is that licence?, to reacquaint myself with computing / video / arcade games that I haven't really touched since my very late teens.

My peers have come up with some rather wonderful web-based games that include the sublime Grow v.1 by Eyemaze and the wonderful Fantastic Contraption; both of which enchanted me and brought out a child-like wonder in me (not seen since 1999) much in the same way as the "Living Books" CD-ROM series did in the early 1990s with Mercer Mayer's "Just Grandma and Me" (1992). Then there is the ingenious Wiki Paths: The Great Link Race, described as a "Wikipedia-based scavenger hunt game" though I would say that it would have more in common with the "six degrees of separation" idea and would seem to lend itself nicely to Prensky's suggestion that the, now irrelevant, digital native have hypertext-like minds - all I can say is that I found it frantic especially as you are up against the clock.

For my part, I have also reacquainted myself to the classic text-based "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" game which is now online over at BBC Radio 4 and graphical. I also did something that I haven't done since my late teens and that was to buy some computer games for the PC that were on sale. Like Gee, I went for something that interested me and were of very different gaming and literary genres - Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile", "Lost" and Clive Barker's "Jericho".

Tune in tomorrow for a report on my experiences with the "Death on the Nile" game.

Week 4 of the course saw the teams being given an exercise that involved building a game around the Google Earth platform. Team 2 member, Nicholas Palmer, got the ball rolling by providing a useful mind map of the task at hand - this instantly gave us a quick, ready visual aid.

There was some suggestion that we should have some learning outcomes, which I, personally, was not keen because a) we didn't have an idea for a game; and b) is there such a thing as attributing learning outcomes to a game? attributing rules to a game, yes! but learning outcomes??

A quick Google search trawl came up with the following resources that might provide us with some inspiration for a game, included:

• Google Earth blog
• Google Earth Outreach
• Google for Educators
• Top 10 Games with Google Earth
• Google Earth Community

Marie Leadbetter suggested that we should meet up "virtually" using Skype to discuss the project and Bill Babouris gave the team the idea for a game based up the recently conceived New Seven Wonders of the World - the game idea was tentatively centred around the notion of a "knowledge quest".

On Wednesday evening of Week 4, the team met via Skype to thrash out the aims and objectives of the game and to decide who was going to contribute to what. It should be said that this was the most amazing brain-storming, project management session ever conducted virtually. We went from an idea to a fully-realised project plan in 1.5 hours.

One of the ideas we liked was a quiz that was created by My Wonder World on Asia. The quiz was created using Keyhole Markup Language (KML) which is an "is an XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers" which I had been playing with a couple of weeks prior to the team project. Unfortunately, we were not able to see how the KML file was constructed as it had been compressed into a KMZ file. Bill Babouris came up trumps again for finding a KMZ-KML converter that us to uncompress the file to see how it was constructed.

It became very clear to me that the quiz would be very doable and that I probably should be the person to code it as I had already been using it as well as having a long and varied computer programming background. All that remained was to identify the tasks and action points to be done and to assign each one to a team member. By Sunday, all questions, introductory text, images, coding, testing was completed.

An interesting topic that came out of the discussions was the notion of feedback and how it should be presented to the user. We felt that terms like "right" and "wrong" seem too hard and final and that we should endeavour to use more softer, and less negative, language in the feedback boxes. This team exercise turned out to be a very fulfilling and fun ride from "Oh, what are we going to do?" to "Ta-da, it's finished".