Virtual Learning Worlds

I currently have the pleasure of playing through IBM’s Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) game, Innov8. I met with a colleague who also had a chance to see the demo, talk to the IBM team, and play the game (although I question whether or not he’s even downloaded the beta).

He felt that the game was not a good educational tool, a good learning experience. People often have this reaction the first time they see an educational game or game-like tool. People also seem to bring up the same reason my colleague mentioned: it can’t standalone, at least not well. “It’s too linear, the students can’t make any decisions”. “There’s so much more that goes into BPM/SOA that the game doesn’t address”. “If only I could customize it and add more decision points”.

I’m not sure if I consider most of these complaints valid. Yes, in an *ideal* world the game would be all these things and more. But these things aren’t easy to design, develop, and implement. It’s not like words on a page or pictures and text on the web. I tried convincing my colleague that the game isn’t a standalone learning tool, and that the things he talks about (more decisions, more background on SOA/BPM, linear story, etc) can still take place OUTSIDE the game. The IBM team that put this together even told us that the game is one piece in a 3-piece learning module. There’s an introduction session to address the pre-requisite knowledge needed to play the game, then there’s the game (with 3 different levels), then there’s the debrief. I tried to tell my colleague that the facilitation piece AFTER students play the game is where you can address all your concerns via a discussion which becomes one of the key learning moments in the process. I don’t think I did a very good job convincing, but I did find a Jim Gee quote that could help with the same argument in the future:

Effects (good or bad) flow not from the game but from game + context. Played strategically, with reflective interactions with parents and peers, they have good cognitive effects…

I’m not trying to pick on just a single colleague here, I’ve heard this argument from other folks as well when they first examine a learning game. I’m not sure why educators have this preconception of a learning game being a perfect standalone learning experience. Instructors don’t solely rely on a lecture in a classroom, they often have electronic support like video, images, or slides, they have assignment support like readings, as well as labs and activities. I can’t quite make sense of where this notion comes from…

A student and I have been taking a close look at Multiverse this week along with Google SketchUp. The good news? Both appear to be free for educators looking to experiment. We’re hopefully going to have a Multiverse server up and running before the end of the year to test out the technology and how to integrate Google Earth data and models from Google SketchUp. This offers a lot of interesting and unique opportunities for us. I was never a proponent of re-creating the real world in Second Life, but I feel a bit differently about doing this in Multiverse for several reasons:

1. Google already has a lot of the terrain data. If it works as seamlessly as the C-Net article claims, I could theoretically punch in State College’s longitude and latitude coordinates, and the terrain within Multiverse would mimic it.
2. Modeling within SketchUp is much easier than modeling within Second Life. Especially if you’re able to start from Google Earth images of real structures. SketchUp, from what I understand, can also publish out various file formats that work with 3D Studio Max, Maya, and other popular 3D tools. So if you build in SketchUp for Multiverse, but for some reason Multiverse implodes, the models are outside the world and could still be used for other applications.
3. Multiverse is a platform designed to help people build MMO games and contains several pre-built frameworks for things like combat, quests, AI, physics, inventory, and other consistent game elements. The piece that excites me is the quest framework. Imagine building a portion of the PSU Campus, populating it with non-player characters (NPCs) with basic dialog AI, and building campus quests. I could see quests that serve as virtual tours for high school seniors thinking about attending PSU, for incoming freshman that involve finding their dorms, commons area, and class buildings before arriving on campus, for athletes helping them deal with time management issues, trivia quests about the history of the campus…the list goes on and on.

The virtual worlds space has always been exciting, but I think we’re going to see some HUGE announcements soon. This paragraph caught me eye from the C-Net article:

Of course, Multiverse’s project is not the only one that has sprung up to make use of this data. Google is rumored to be working on a prototype virtual world, a beta test of which may or may not be under way at Arizona State University.

Time to buckle up for the ride!

In the midst of a Second Life meeting today, my IM heated up with news of Google tools making their way into Virtual Worlds. It appears Multiverse is the platform that will work (supposedly) with Google SketchUp and possibly other Google Tools.

You can read about it at a couple different places.

This is a lot to think about…too much to post on right now, but I will try and follow-up sometime this week.

Over a year ago, I authored a lengthy blog post about World of Warcraft TV. I still think a HUGE untapped market exists for this sort of thing. I just noticed a comment from Steve today on that particular post…it turns out one particular MMO has adopted something similar to what I posted about in June 2006.

Eve Online TV

This is a little more “news” style vs. what I envision a WoW-TV looking like, but the idea is very similar. Giving the mass player base the ability to watch top-players, guilds, or corporations playing parts of the game the average joe will never see. Or playing parts of the game that other plays could use expert help or advice with.

I think we’ll continue to see more of this as MMOs continue to gain momentum…

We held our first second life event last Friday, a “Build Your Own Motorcycle” event. The numbers weren’t staggering (we had 3 entries), but overall I think it was a success. We had five IST faculty members as judges along with some other students and instructors who came by to observe. So what did we learn putting on the event?

• Registration - I neglected to put a registration system in place before advertising the event. We ended up experimenting with an in-world registration system that captured the avatar’s name and pushed it to a Twitter account when touched. We had some issues with this, so we then created a similar system that captured the avatar’s name and sent it to a gmail account. The system had a few bugs in it due to admin features we tried to implement, but overall it could work.

• Synchronous vs. asynchronous - We decided to hold the event at a specific time within SL. The idea is that participants would login at a certain time, register, and then have time to show the judges their creations. I think a better idea would have been to put the creations on display for a week or so before the event, then have a synchronous get together in-world to announce the winners. Trying to do it all at once hurt our turnout.
• With the limitations on avatars per server, we designed a ’staging area’ in case we had over 40 people participating. The staging area was on our neighbor’s space, ETS @ PSU, right along the Istania border. To the average participant, they wouldn’t even notice the server differentiation but it would have offered us more flexibility and bandwidth.
• Permissions - We thought about using a specific events ‘group’ for the participants with special permissions on the island but I felt this might be too much administrative overhead. I didn’t want to worry about getting people registered, checking the system for entries, handing out group invites, and working with the judges all at the same time. Instead, I subdivided the staging area into its own parcel of land, and set the permissions to allow anyone to res and run scripts in this area. This is somewhat risky, but I felt confident we’d be ok since I could revert back at any time. Once the event was over, I reset the permissions.

That about sums it up for now. We are already thinking of a Halloween-themed event, but I’m not sure I have the time to design, organize, advertise, and host an event so soon. We’re hoping that other individuals or departments within IST ’sponsor’ events like this in the future with our help.

It’s a very rare day I get to see TWO prototypes of promising educational games. A colleague, Wade, found two library-themed games from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. The games seem to focus on Librarian training. I’m guessing (could be wrong here) that they’ll be used to train students who might be working in the Library at CMU, or possibly general Library training for youngsters.

My favorite part? NO DIRECTIONS! I was able to successfully play both games without being forced to go through some sort of tutorial or instruction screen. One element of the second game was a bit confusing in that I couldn’t figure out what type of resource the customer was looking for. I’m sure there is a que somewhere to alert the player, but I must have missed it. On a side note, this is the beauty of the iPhone…NO MANUALS! Simply take it out of the box, dock it, and you’re off and running. Intuitive design for software and hardware is becoming absolutely critical to success these days.

My second serious game encounter was a meeting with a Penn State Faculty member from Harrisburg, Peter, who is here at University Park for this academic year for a Fellowship program. Normally, when these types of meetings appear on my calendar, I end up sitting down with someone who hasn’t played a game since the Atari 2600, but recently read an article on someone using HALO to teach physics, and now has the grand idea of rebuilding a HALO-esque game specifically designed for Physics education.

In a nutshell, most of these ideas are what we like to call “farts in the wind” and have almost no grounding or foundation to build on.

But Peter showed up with a demo on a jump drive that was built in Game Studio A6. The concept is a 2-player racing game, but each racer can change the fuel souce for his/her car “on the fly” from wind, solar, gas, hydrogen, etc. So in addition to racing against one another, you’re also doing your best to preserve your fuel and keep your car running the longest. The weather changes (night to day, windy to calm, etc) and you also have an emissions readout. Very interesting stuff. I’m hoping to find a student or two to help out and get some design and programming behind this and see where it goes.