Mission

In the ComETS GAME DESIGN group, we will try to model what we investigate. So, we’ll be doing playful hands-on research/investigation, and application/testing of what we find.

Objectives

• host a 90-minute meeting twice a month
• deconstruct compelling games that require a lot of cognitive work (and/or busywork, or “grinding”)
• figure out what makes them compelling
• apply that magic formula to various coursework situations
• share results with peers/colleagues

Please email johnmartin@wisc.edu for more information.

“We developed this publishing system (at great cost, no doubt), and are willing to give it away for free to anyone who would like to use it to create and freely distribute cool eTexts. If you want to profit from it (industries), we’re taking 30% to cover the cost of continued development of this and other cool tools. If you’re just looking for an easy-to-use, and elegant tool for getting your knowledge out to the world for free (schools, non-profits, self-publishing authors), you’re welcome to use it for free.”

Unlike the status quo method of paying for software, Apple is not requiring an upfront payment. Consider the model behind Adobe’s DPS, to use it for a one-off publication costs $395 (plus Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, plus a suitable computer that runs the software). Then you’re allowed to profit from that one-off as much as you can with no extra fees, right? Apple flips that around and says that iBooks Author is free to use (plus cost of suitable computer that runs the software) to create dynamic iBooks content that looks and runs amazing on their iOS — but also as a pretty decent PDF creator that displays (non-dynamic content) well on any browser.

I also bet we’ll see people “trying out” (prototyping) ideas for books here — something they might not have had the where-with-all to even approach before and if they think they’ve got a hit might decide to either publish with Apple or reformat with some other system to sell for more than 70% profit.

But for not-for-profit uses, it seems okay. For example, the director of a senior center might want residents actively engaged in creating a legacy artifact for their children, but don’t have the publishing expertise to pull them through the process? This seems like a fabulous tool for seniors to pretty easily publish a cool autobiography or family lineage book. They wouldn’t (typically) want to sell it to their family, but would want it to be cool enough to engage the next generation.

• You say that you’re a non-profit community health organization that wants to get good-looking, easy-to-read health information out free to your clients, but can’t afford Adobe?
• You say that you’re a teacher who wants to create course readers or study guides for your course, but don’t want to force your students to  buy textbooks?
• You say that you’re a graduate student, passionate about your research, but suspicious of the journal system, and you’d like to get your research into the hands of as many people as possible?

If you want to profit from it, and manage to do so, then you pay.

It’s a private version of a tax system – i.e. as a citizen (user), you’re free to use services (Fire, Police, etc.) as long as you don’t profit from them. If you profit from it, there’s a 30% tax to subsidize services for those who don’t. It’s definitely a bold shift from the status quo of software. But terrible? I don’t know yet.

First, a redirect — let’s take “mobile” out of it and look at the ideals of a Learning Strategy. Then, let’s consider how “mobile” could support that learning strategy.

Learning Strategy (Ideal)

1. Comprehensive: Rather than develop a bunch of different systems, one framework that incorporates all aspects of the university would be ideal.
2. Student-centered: If we approach that strategy from the perspective of student learning, we’ll need to recognize and address the fact that “classroom learning” (and much of what the current traditional university systems are built to address) are but one piece of the university experience for students. Our strategy must “play nice” with the other priorities of students to be incorporated fully into their lives.
3. Cost-Effective: Since we know that the most successful students are those who identify as being members of learning communities, the strategy must support student integration into, and development within, learning communities. Community support minimizes floundering time, and more fully immerses students into their career fields, minimizing the amount of time needed to finish school.
4. Personalized: Given that much of education is about the development of a personal path within a generalized curriculum, the strategy should support easy personalization, and allow flexibility for students to engage in learning activities in ways that both meet their learning preferences and challenge them to develop skills navigating alternative pedagogical techniques that others may employ/prefer.
5. Active: Embodied, experiential learning activities, such as lab work, group projects, presentation, and fieldwork can be pedagogically-powerful activities. The strategy should provide support for these types of activities by, for example, offering access to learning resources (content, process, mentoring) whenever students are engaged in learning.

Given these five ideals (and there may be others), let’s examine the role that mobile can play.

Mobile support for Learning Strategy

One feature/constraint of mobile devices is their size/portability. On one hand, they’re small and thus less effective for much rich content delivery (large visualizations, deep reading, etc.). On the other hand, their portability makes them amazing conduits for just-in-time connections to information, friends, and expertise — lightweight prompts that still put much of the learning on the individual.

1. Comprehensive: Mobile can support easy, anywhere, anytime access to a surface layer of all aspects of UW. This is great for reminders, prompts, and time and place-based notifications, but perhaps less effective for in-depth investigations of websites, texts, visually-rich lectures, seminar-style discussions, etc.
2. Student-centered: Mobile can play a huge role in supporting student schedules, and connections to classes, jobs, classmates, student orgs, family, friends, finances, food, laundry, sports. If students juggles it, it should be easily supported and accessible from their mobile devices.
3. Cost-Effective: Because mobile devices are intimate (pocket/purse/bedside) and accessible 24/7, students use them. We should tap into that by making their access to their UW life as seamless as possible — e.g. already-trusted personal devices should not require multiple logins (on small screens with tiny keyboards) to access their information. Let them choose to rely on their lockscreen password. If it’s a PITA to get to their “UW learning stuff” they won’t, and it won’t be cost effective. If they use the structure we provide, they will use it to develop their academic identity, and more effectively find their niche/identity in learning and affinity groups.
4. Personalized: For this, consider mobile’s role not as a content delivery system, but a route or means to connect with other learners. Perhaps the most effective way to allow personalization is to foster the peer-to-peer connections with like-minded learners in their learning communities. Fostering learning communities may also be the most effective way to challenge them to translate learning into formats that others prefer/understand.
5. Active: Mobile can support field research and investigation including citizen-science, citizen journalism, place-based investigations, tours, and interviewing. It can also provide portable spaces for note-taking and collaboration (e.g. peer review).

Community Gardens near me.

Local Food Systems Scenario: Players locate and map where food comes from in their neighborhood. Dairy farms? Community garden plots? Organic Farms and CSA? Canneries? Egg farms? Beef farms? Cabbage? Cranberries? Orchards? Processing plants?

Play: In the map to the right, I’ve outlined in red the community garden plots near me. For going over to them and walking around both sets, I’d get some points, similar to the UNM game Chris Holden created. If I became an expert on the locations of the other community gardens in my city, I’d earn some sort of badge. If I learned more by interviewing some of the gardeners about what they’re growing (and why), and sharing that in the game, I’d earn some further expertise points. I could add restaurants that use local food as well. The game is limited only by what the quests are, and in this game, I can challenge — and accept challenges — from other players, so there really is no limit.

Basically, I have a notion that if we got together with a few interested peers and students/PAs, we could come up with a really interesting interdisciplinary place-based field experience that offered multiple quests at multiple levels of expertise (ala “I’ll take Botany for 200, Alex”) that could be replicated in different areas across the state (and country). Although my initial thoughts center on using ARIS, they only extend as far as using ARIS as a prototyping tool — the actual game might end up in a number of different formats for different technologies.

My goals are these. I’ve been passionate about place-based/embodied learning for decades, and am now in a position where I’ve got access to cool folks and cool tools (Google Maps and ARIS, etc.), and a job where I can finally start to coordinate the creation of something amazing that combines them all. My big evil scheme is to get smart  brains in one whiteboard-filled room, and let ideas cross-pollinate. I imagine a large scalable tour/game/field experience with new quests/activities being continually added as they’re developed.

If we build a structure/frame together, it will be easier to add components individually, as needs/resources arise. And we can recruit players by luring them from other quests (i.e. I’ve played the Astronomy Quest, and like this activity — maybe I’ll try out the Ecology Quest to supplement my points!)

I have no doubt that players would quickly find that many skills overlap from discipline to discipline. So if I kicked butt in and really enjoyed a Probability sub-quest in the Botany line of quests, I might want to jump over an rip through some Probability sub-quests in the Language line of quests (e.g. um… probability of multi-vowel adjacency in billboard ads in Wisconsin?).

To enter my apartment, through its “front” door, I currently have to walk up some rickety steps to an old deck that’s floating on a rubber roof on top of a 7′ by 11′ first floor bathroom addition. Though it’s old, the deck overlooks Olbrich Park, and Garver Mill, which foregrounds beautiful sunrises and glows warmly in the sunset. In other words, the deck sucks but the view is very nice. Unfortunately, it’s too hot in the summer sun, and too cold in the winter wind, and on too many of the days between, it’s too wet in the Spring/Fall rains.

And it’s an ugly “front” door to my home.

So, I’m starting to investigate what it would cost to add a second story addition onto the bathroom, and replace the open deck with an enclosed 3-season porch that shades the summer sun, opens up to summer breezes, and soaks up winter sun — while keeping the weather off the steps. And providing a beautiful, but modest entry room with a sunny breakfast space and wood-heated coziness.

This image is how I imagine it might look if viewed from inside the current front door to the apartment. In other words, to get to where the viewer is, you would have walked up the steps behind the gray walls behind the wood stove, and walked past the big windows, then turned around to this perspective. Maybe there’d be a couch on the left wall from which to watch the fire on a cool night. And on the right (SE side of house), the sun would rise every morning through the windows, and when it set, Garver would be the last thing glowing — besides the fire.

The GLS Conference is the premier event in the field of videogames and learning. Now in its eighth year, this grassroots “indie” event is evolving to include more innovative content formats and new programming. The GLS Conference is one of the few destinations where the people who create high- quality digital learning media can gather for serious discussion about what is happening in the field and how the field can serve the public interest. Our event is well known for its exceptionally high quality of content yet “community event” feel. Each year, we foster in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business. Our continued commitment is to reinvent learning both in and out of formal school environments through the promise of games and simulations.

Conference highlights include: keynotes by leaders in both academics and industry; interactive workshops on game research and game design; both individual and symposia presentation sessions; big debates about critical aspects of gaming and game design; hands‐on game play in the arcade; the “hall of failure”; a massively multi-player evening poster session over cocktails & hors d’oeuvres; fireside chats that enable cozy conversations among speakers and attendees; and the GLS Games and Art Exhibition. A new session type offered this year will be the Educational Game Arcade, which will offer a space for conference attendees to play the games created by members of our community.

Confirmed speakers include:

• COLLEEN MACKLIN
• REED STEVENS
• SEBASTIAN DETERDING

We offer a variety of session formats, encouraging submissions from traditional paper presentations to innovative formats focusing on game play. All submissions are due online by January 31, 2012. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site at http://glsconference.org as well as more information about the GLS Educators Symposium and the GLS Doctoral Consortium.

Since last week, when I was surprised that the (very nice) poster I had designed and printed cost $650, I’ve been really putting a lot of thought into the weight of visual communications, and the real need to up our individual skill levels at communicating visually.

Visual Communication tools are getting accessible enough and good enough that what used to require specialized equipment and trained professionals to create, is now becoming mainstream. Just as we began to teach penmanship when pens and pencils first became mainstream, and taught typing/keyboarding when computers first became mainstream, we need to now teach design — or at least begin to transition our institutions and structures to meet them when they reach us.

A literate population needs to be able to read, write, and speak. We also should be able to design — at least adequately — on our own. We’re beginning to see this with photography and video, and these are good starts, but they actually often contain too much information. So, what tools will let me be able to do simpler video infographics like this one? (Or even static ones?) And are the tools easy enough for me to pick up?

It’s like a dream come true.

In 2006, I lobbied for a web-based version of MIT’s River City Augmented reality editor. ARIS delivered that for me in 2010.

The idea was that the web offered accessibility to folks who didn’t have smartphones — folks like teachers and their students. A web-based editor would allow classrooms to engage in place-based design. I used the few projects we had started at the time as examples of the type of projects that could be done by students.

We’ve reached that point, and with ARIS v1.6, I think we’ll begin engaging in some massive exploration of GeoAnnotation and Data-collection.

Good times a-coming!