Informal Learning

College@Home just posted a list of the 25 best games that involve learning in some way.  The list is nicely categorised, and while some of the selections are predictable, the sheer number and detailed explanation makes this a handy post indeed.
Virtual Learning: 25 Best Sims and Games for the Classroom (College@Home)

Children in hospitals across the USA will soon have access to Xbox 360 consoles, complete with a private version of Xbox Live thanks to Microsoft and Companions in Courage.

Full Story.

I was never into D&D myself, although a lot of the things I did enjoy, like the Fighting Fantasy books, were obviously inspired by it,  Gary Gygax’s death this week has prompted a lot of discussion, here is an excellent comment from a Kotaku post:

Gary Gygax’s Video Gaming Legacy
Comment by: Islandkiwi

“I owe this man a lot. When I was a kid in the late 70’s - early 80’s, D&D was a new kind of experience. Playing it with my friends allowed us to puzzle-solve, deduce logically, and think creatively. I mean, you could create your own stories. We branched out to Gamma World, Top Secret, then there were the new games like Ultima and…what was that car one, we friggin’ loved that game.The point I’m trying to make is that D&D opened a creative door that got me and my friends thinking, rather than being mindless hooligans we became thoughtful hooligans. The result has been an explosion of sci-fi/fantasy books, games, and movies. From a more personal perspective it allowed so many of us to think…we always think learning takes place in the classroom, but for many of us learning also took place in small groups, with small statues and dice.

I stopped playing sometime in intermediate school, but I went on to college and law school and became the man I am today. Games like D&D encouraged creativity and critical thinking, and I personally believe that the experience of putting my brain to use helped me get to where I am today. And it’s funny, even twenty years later I can still recall some of those missions I played with my friends. They were good times, and I thank Mr. Gygax for inviting us all to play.”

One of the first games I remember playing, on the ZX Spectrum of course, was The Hobbit.  I even played it before I read the book, and it was the inspiration for doing so.  The Hobbit, and other text adventures like it, were games that demanded a certain level of literacy from the player, and rewarded development of language skills.  Lesser titles of the same genre often demanded not so much literacy as a semi-psychic ability to guess what the programmer had been thinking at the time of writing the game, which was a frustration.   I remember spending ages stuck on a rainy street in the game 221B Baker Street before finally working out that I needed to, “Hail Hansom Cab.”

The adventure genre eventually grew up of course, and through one-wrong-decision-and-you’re-deadfests like Gold Rush graphics were added and the narratives became more complex and original.  This is a genre that has always demanded that the player reads and takes note of the story as it evolves, even when the text was replaced by speech in titles released around the supposed death of the genre, no pun intended, such as my personal favourite, Grim Fandango.  Now here was a title that offered so much intrigue for the player, and references such disparate elements as the Mexican Day of the Dead, and the film noir genre.  There’s a great deal of inspiration for wider cultural learning just wrapped in that game alone.

More recently the genre has been given something of a resurrection in the form of Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS.  Sadly not available on these shores yet, Prof Layton takes the player through an intriguing story that demands a lot of reading, although maybe not as much as the average JRPG, and a great deal of puzzle solving to boot.

I’ll close by pointing you towards a few tools that enable you to create your own adventure games:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ - “Adventure Game Studio (AGS for short) allows you to create your own point-and-click adventure games, similar to the early 90’s Sierra and Lucasarts adventures. It consists of an easy-to-use development environment, and run-time engine.”

http://www.allitis.com/agast/index.html - “If you’ve ever wanted to create graphic adventures, like The Secret of Monkey Island from LucasFilm Games, King’s Quest from Sierra On-line, or Myst from Cyan, there’s never been a better time than now to get started!”

http://www.hungrysoftware.com/ - “SLUDGE has always been great. But now, it’s also a programming language. SLUDGE (standing for Scripting Language for Unhindered Development of a Gaming Environment) is a system by which anyone (within reason) can make an adventure game.”

http://www.visionaire2d.net/index.php?newlang=english  -  “Visionaire is software that enables you to create your own adventure game without even having experience in a programming language! The only thing it takes is creativity.”

http://dead-code.org/home/ -  “Wintermute Engine Development Kit is a set of tools for creating and running graphical “point&click” adventure games, both traditional 2D ones and modern 2.5D games (3D characters on 2D backgrounds).”

Colin Rowsell over at The Escapist, home of Zero Punctuation no less, just dropped a great article on the impact of technology both in and out of school on education. I strongly encourage you to read it.

Idea Sex in the Classroom

SEGA have just announced English of the Dead, a game in which zombies come forth speaking Japanese, and you have to slay them with the relevant English phrase. Someone please release this in a wider variety of languages, and I’ll be multi-lingual in no time!

English of the Dead [NeoGAF via VideoGame Forums, via Kotaku]

The Nintendo DS has been selling at an incredible rate since its release in 2004, reaching nearly 65 million units worldwide at the end of 2007. Indeed, there are two in my own household. and my niece and nephew are never quieter than when playing a round or two of Mario Kart with each other over WiFi.

More recently, educational titles such as Brain Training, Sight Training, Big Brain Academy and even My Word Coach have started to become viable prospects in the UK market. Games of this type have long been available in Japan, and it’s great to see educational games that reach the same standards of presentation and gameplay as other genres. No disrespect to Granny’s Garden, of which more in upcoming post, but it’s popularity mainly arose because it was one of the few times you got to use the computer at school, rather than being the game of choice. That 5 1/4 floppy containing a copy of Chuckie Egg was never far from hand when the teacher wasn’t looking!

While it’s great to see mainstream educational titles out there, there’s still a cost attached to collect a decent library of them, and the competition is strong from the more established genres, I’m looking at you Zelda. With a flashcart such as the M3 or R4, you can open up your DS to a world of what are known as Homebrew applications, which are programs written by enthusiasts. Many moons ago you probably would’ve found these as listings in a copy of Your Spectrum, but these days they’re available to download and use for free. The M3 and R4 can also of course be used for video game piracy, but we don’t condone that use of the device at all, so don’t copy that floppy.

So, let’s take a look at a few examples. and consider how what learning could take place therein that could transfer across to achievement in school…

Treasures of Gaia - http://stravingo.over-blog.fr/article-11878935.html

Essentially a Google Maps browser for the DS available in English and French. Unfortunately I couldn’t get this one working due to the DS needing a WEP or unencrypted WLAN, but the screenshots certainly look promising. Geography would get an obvious boost from this, and then there are the multilingual possibilities too.

DSLiveWeather - http://www.dev-scene.com/NDS/DSLiveWeather

This turns your DS into a client for weather.com. Great for moving on from the web query unit in KS3 ICT, as well as obvious Geography applications.

Phidias - http://sivullinen.fi/nds/projects.php?subaction=showfull&id=1173373766&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&

Colors - http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/

Both excellent drawing tools that save to PC compatible formats. Colors has the exciting planned feature of WiFi collaborative painting. Great for Art homework?

Flickbook - http://www.dev-scene.com/NDSNews:2007-09-04_-_FlickBook_v0.2

Animanatee - http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14116

Animation programs, with the option to export again in PC compatible formats. Has possible applications in English by enabling the user to tell simple stories using pictures, Maths for geometry work?

NewDictDS - http://tvgame360.com.tw/viewthread.php?tid=21913&extra=&page=1

Although the page looks scary at first for non-Japanese readers, there is some English there. This is a dictionary interpreter for StarDict dictionaries with voice capabilities. Great for learning and pronouncing new words in English, but also other languages too?

TxtWriter - http://ds.spacemonkeymafia.com/txtwriter.php

Simply a text editor for the DS. Write your story or essay on the go!

NitroTracker - http://nitrotracker.tobw.net/

I wouldn’t be making music today without TCB Tracker, and this program looks very exciting. It’s a tracker composition tool for the DS, with MIDI support. You can export in WAV, which means you can then convert to MP3 on a PC. I’d love to hear your compositions if you get working with this tool.

Mathomatic - http://blog.davr.org/category/nintendo-ds/mathomatic/

A general purpose computer algebra system.

So there we are, lots to get working with, and more programs are being released all of the time. Have fun!

How can playing an FPS become a informal learning experience, and lead to other learning experiences? Granted, there are those games such as Portal that provide a reasonably new experience (ever heard of Narbacular Drop?) that requires you to learn the rules, which are based at least in a physics that at least is partly grounded in this universe, in order to succeed, but what game doesn’t do that to some degree?

Most games have some kind of tutorial that is a learning experience, but generally these experiences are about learning how to play that particular game in terms of its particular idiosyncracies, something that Portal has in spades, and Blacksite: Area 51 has in terms of just not being that good.

The answer, as you may have guessed from the post title, lies in the magic of level editor. Criticism levelled at computers and consoles these days, if it is written by someone of a certain vintage, often veers off into the territory occupied by, “In my day when you turned your computer on, you had to learn basic commands, or you didn’t get to play anything.” This is closely followed in most cases by stories of weekends occupied entirely by typing in five or six pages of BASIC listings fuelled only by a multipack of Space Raiders and gallons of blue pop.

Yes, I was there as well, although I wasn’t allowed the blue pop. Actually though, we were in a minority then, because in actual fact, that kind of exercise, even when you got to the stage of writing your own game or program from scratch, wasn’t a massive amount of fun for anyone else but yourself, unless you were Matthew Smith or David Jones; and equally as profitable.

Nowadays though, the kids (and us) have it much better. With most titles that are worth playing come copious editing tools. With the release of Unreal Tournament 3 for PC, gamers can finally get their hands on suite of tools that will enable them to design and implement levels for PS3, as well as PC. Exciting stuff.

So, where’s the learning in all of this, outside of just learning how to create levels for a particular game, which can be profitable in itself? Well, I see it like this:

1. You’re creating something for public consumption, therefore there’s going to be some kind of feedback loop, evaluation and refinement process involving other users
2. You’re going to have to consider the physics and geometry of the structures you’re placing in the level; the more realistic the game engine, the more this point holds true
3. When designing a level, you need to consider the kinds of behaviours that already exist in the game, and design appropriately
4. Maybe you’ll need to work collaboratively with other people who have skills that you don’t, whether that’s musicians, artists or testers
5. With single player levels, you’re learning to build a compelling narrative; unless of course you’re making a level for Serious Sam

Of course, level design leads naturally to modding, and modding leads to things like Counterstrike, which led to a career for a few people.

Good starting points include the Cube engine and Sauerbraten. I’ve seen some excellent results from Mission Maker from Immersive Education too, and it’s relatively child-friendly compared to UT3 and Half-Life 2.

The next step seems to be entire games designed around the concept of creating the levels yourself. Although this at first sounds incredibly lazy, in fact it’s kind of empowering. YouTube has been a great success primarily because although there are countless videos of people doing idiotic / amazing things that you can point and laugh at, you can also allow people to point and laugh at you as well, so everybody’s happy. It also removes the need for You’ve Been Framed to exist, which is just champion.

Everybody feels involved, and who knows, the video you posted could be the latest Internet hit, and you could end up on the real telly! The most recently hyped of these type of games that rely on user-generated content has been LittleBigPlanet, a game I’m looking forward to myself.

We’ve travelled a long way since Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit, as far as Polychromatic Funk Monkey, to be precise.

Finally, how about a game that requires you to cooperate with yourself?

So, here’s a quick roundup of where you can find these kinds of tools and games:

The Cube Engine: http://cube.sourceforge.net/

“Cube is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine”

Sauerbraten (Cube 2): http://www.sauerbraten.org/

Ogre 3D: http://www.ogre3d.org/

An open source 3D engine.

Delta3D: http://www.delta3d.org/

Another open source 3D engine.

Valve Hammer Editor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Hammer_Editor

From the developer of Half-Life 2 and Portal.

Unreal Tournament 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_3

Includes editing tools in the PC version

Mission Maker: http://www.immersiveeducation.com/missionmaker/

Child-friendly 3D editing tools, a good starting point

Polychromatic Funk Monkey: http://www.farbs.org/games.html

“[...] a tile based platforming game about building maps for tile based platforming games [...]”

Have fun, and let me know of any other examples you can think of.