Adventure Author

Adventure Author lives!

Excellent news! The kind people at EPSRC have funded a follow-on Adventure Author project which focuses of training teachers to include game making in their classes. It lasts for 18 months, and Cathrin will be working 50% time on it. I will be leading it. We will also be recruiting  computer science students to work with teachers in classrooms to provide technical help.

If you're a teacher who works within a 100 mile radius of Edinburgh, and would like to take part, email Judy <dot> Robertson @ hw <dot> ac <dot>uk.

Creative Writing, Creative Sparks and Adventure Author

Judy and I presented our latest thinking about gamemaking and storytelling when we spoke at the Creative Sparks conference in Edinburgh at the end of February. The day was organised by the Scottish Book Trust to promote and celebrate creative writing, and we were delighted to share our digital take on this area of language.

We have been analysing the games produced during the Campie school project last year and our thinking about the processes the children use has continued to evolve. We are particularly interested in the ways in which Gunther Kress's concept of reading pathways develops when considered in a 3D, 360 degree, interactive, immersive environment, and have noted the importance of what we are calling 'story locations' and 'narrative vehicles' in helping these pathways emerge. Children are creating their stories using more than language, thinking in visual, spatial and logical ways to make a game in which their story can be told. We are excited by the realisation that the children are behaving in new ways as writers and readers, with important implications for both teachers and learners.

We feel there is much here to fulfil the cross-curricular requirements of A Curriculum for Excellence: the literacy and English guidelines call for future-proof texts, technology the making of computer games; the Adventure Author approach offers a creative and motivating way forward for schools who are wondering how to meet these new objectives.

Download our slides, and do contact us if you would like to know more.

Download Adventure Author new technologies and creative writing for SBT March 2009

Conference on imaginative education

 

Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG)

 

7th International Conference on Imagination and Education

July 15-18, 2009

Coast Hotel, English Bay

Vancouver, Canada

During the past decade engaging and developing the imagination has come to the forefront as essential to building more educated, just, and sustainable societies. This 7th International Conference on Imagination and Education continues to build on growing interest around the world in the role of imagination in teaching and learning not only in schools, but also in a wide variety of educational settings that include museums, outdoor and experiential venues, and new media applications such as on-line games and social networks.

This year, the IERG at Simon Fraser University again invites researchers, educators, practitioners, students, and policymakers to join us in continuing to shift the paradigms of theory and practice in education. We welcome proposals on a diverse range of research from our local and international community that includes but is not limited to:

Imagination and

* Teacher Education

* Museum Education

* Ecological Education

* Assessment

* Arts-Based Education

* Science Education

* Technology and Media Studies

* Oral Language Education.

 

A two-day pre-conference workshop organized and presented by IERG will provide a comprehensive overview of imaginative education theory and practice, aimed at building participants' expertise in using and teaching Imaginative Education.

Keynote: Eleanor Duckworth, Harvard University. (Author of The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Tell Me More: Listening to Learners Explain, etc.)

Program Committee: Kieran Egan, Mark Fettes, Sean Blenkinsop

 

This year the conference returns to its English Bay setting and participants will be able to enjoy Vancouver's superb setting, our usual outstanding guest speakers, the very popular dinner cruise up Indian Arm fjord, performers, good food, and plentiful opportunities for networking with colleagues from over 20 countries.

Full details of submission requirements and other conference information will be available shortly on our Web site: www.ierg.net

Musing on differences betwen literacy and computing teachers

Occasionally I get interesting glimpses of the world of teaching in Scotland. Usually I am involved either with primary teachers or English specialists who focus on literacy, but I also work with computing teachers from time to time. I did both in the space of two working days recently and it does strike me that there are some interesting differences between these two groups, particularly in relation to their attitudes to curriculum reform (the famous Curriculum for Excellence).

On Friday I gave a seminar at the Creative Sparks conference organised by the Scottish Book Trust. It was great. There were hundreds of primary school teachers, English teachers, storytellers, writers and poets hobnobbing together, excitedly talking about all the great things they were going to achieve now they were throwing off the shackles of the old national curriculum and could teach more flexibly. There were best practice awards showcasing innovative work. There was a rabble rousing keynote from the Children's Laureate, Michael Rosen. He got political about the best ways to foster literacy; the audience got fired up; and the session chair passionately swore that teachers in Scotland - being such a small country - would have a great impact on educational policy from that point forward. The national literacy organisations: the Scottish  Book Trust, the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Literature In Learning; The National Library of Scotland; The Scottish Poetry Library (and many more) were there offering workshops and resource packs and free books. In short, the teachers were committed, enthusiastic, forward looking and well supported. The event was a celebration.

Yestersday, and on previous occasions, when I attended a meeting of computing teachers I did not sense that positive atmosphere. Some computing teachers feel marginalised and threatened within their schools, as head teachers fail to value computing as a subject distinct from ICT. Programming is not the same as using Microsoft Word, but this fact seems to elude Scottish education to some extent. The teachers did not seem happy with the curriculum they were teaching with, because it is boring and too easy and out of date. They were not happy with the hardware in schools. But most of all, they did not seem to believe they have the power to mke positive changes. They weren't grasping Curriculum for Excellence the same glee as their literacy counterparts.Sometimes if you make a suggestion of how things could be different, you get a thousand reasons why not, and scorn for being naive. There is an acceptance that things they don't like will remain that way. This is a great pity. I can see it must be difficult to be a computing teacher, but there are reasons to be positive - it's not as if there is no way to motivate kids to enjoy computing. Game making is a brilliant way to do this, and it's now officially part of the curriculum. All that is needed is some energy, doggedness and rabble rousing. I wonder if Michael Rosen has a computer scientist brother? I wonder if Computing Scotland and Scotland IS and the British Computer Society could club together like the literacy organisations to run such inspirational conferences? Why not? Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation, and all that.

Curriculum for Excellence Game Making slides

I went to a meeting for Edinburgh teachers yesterday to give a talk about making games within a Curriculum for Excellence. At least, I thought I was meant to talk about that but it ended up being about an SQA qualification in game design instead. Anyhow, here are the slides (Download Making GamesForresterSchool2ndMarch)  for those who might be interested. I am a bit fuzzy on the difference between A Curriculum for Excellence and SQA national qualifications. CfE is meant to be for 3-18, yes? And national qaulifications cover early secondary through to adult learners? And then there are highers and standard grades for 4th - 6th years? So surely there should be a clear progression of skills from primary into secondary, then into standard graqdes and highers? Well apparently not if you look at game design which, as you know, is embedded into CfE in the technology objectives. Because even the early stages in the CfE have game design and implementation built in. And then you get to SQA modules in game design (which I now can't find the link to) which only contain game analysis and game design. No game implementation, mark you. All being well, in a few years there will be kids who learned how to make games in primary school coming through to secondary and taking SQA modules which will let them analyse and design games but not make them for themselves. What? Those learners will not be impressed, me thinks. What kind of a Niagra-Falls dwelling dinosaur wrote the SQA game design objectives which seperate design from implementation?

No wonder students don't sign up for computing courses at university. The secondary school qualifications framework seems to be very effective at putting them off.

Adventure Game Making software release

Of possible interest from a mailing list I subscribe to. ** IFIP ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING NEWS SERVICE ** http://listserver.tue.nl/mailman/listinfo/icec ** Send all news to: icec@listserver.tue.nl **************************************************** ** NOTE: Please reply to article's originator, ** not this IFIP EC News Service **************************************************** Dear all, It is our pleasure to announce the recent release as a public beta of the 0.9 version of the platform. e-Adventure is a research project aiming to facilitate the integration of educational games and game-like simulations in educational processes in general and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in particular. It has been developed by the e-learning research group ( www.e-ucm.es) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. With e-Adventure, any person can write an educational point & click adventure game. Also it is very simple to create first person simulations based on photos, which can be very useful for training or teaching procedural knowledge. The platform includes special features targeting educational environments, such as built-in assessment and debriefing and the possibility of exporting the games as standards-compliant Learning Objects (packaged according to the IMS Content Packaging specification and marked with IEEE LOM metadata). The games can thus be deployed without effort in different VLEs and stored in content repositories. The tools, and a detailed tutorial, are here: http://e-adventure.e-ucm.es Feel free to visit our website and test-drive the tools. Since we are gearing up for our 1.0 we need everyone's help to locate any remaining bugs and to give us feedback about possible changes to the application. We would love to hear your comments and, if you create an interesting game and wish to give it some exposure, we can make it available through our website (properly credited, of course). Don't forget to have fun! Best regards, The team Some publication references to our work: Pablo Moreno-Ger, Iván Martínez-Ortiz, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón: A Content-Centric Development Process Model. IEEE Computer 41 (3), pp. 24-30. 2008 Pablo Moreno-Ger, Carl Blesius, Paul Currier, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón: Online Learning and Clinical Procedures: Rapid Development and Effective Deployment of Game-Like Interactive Simulations. Transactions on Edutainment I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5080, pp. 288–304. 2008 Pablo Moreno-Ger, José Luis Sierra, Iván Martínez-Ortiz, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón: A Documental Approach to Adventure Game Development. Science of Computer Programming 67(1). 3-31. 2007 ------------------------------------------------ Baltasar Fernandez Manjon ------------------------------------------------ Vicedecano de Investigación y Relaciones Externas Dpto. de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial Facultad de Informatica ( Despacho 414) C/ Profesor Jose Garcia Santesmases S/N, Ciudad Universitaria Universidad Complutense de Madrid 28040 Madrid - SPAIN Email (personal) : balta@fdi.ucm.es Vicedecano: vdxfdi@fdi.ucm.es Tfno (+34) 91 394 75 17 / 7513 | Fax (+34) 91 394 75 47 http://www.e-ucm.es/people/balta/ ------------------------------------------------ **************************************************** ** To send and receive IFIP-EC-NEWS, go to ** http://listserver.tue.nl/mailman/listinfo/icec ** and subscribe directly **************************************************** ** News archives: ** http://listserver.tue.nl/mailman/private/icec/ **************************************************** ** To join the IFIP ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING Group ** contact: g.w.m.rauterberg@tue.nl