I am a big fan of Rocksmith, it has been a breath of fresh air in ways to learn and enjoy guitar now they are ramping up for the next edition of it. Luckily all the downloaded songs are still transferable. (Well less luck and more a necessity!)
I often use it as an example in my talks like the one I am giving this Wednesday at BCS Shropshire.
An interesting new feature has been added though, and so my talk has to evolve to keep up. That of session mode with a reactive and generative music backing band. You play and they keep up. This is really interesting and I can’t wait to see how it pans out with my guitar tinkering. The E3 conference saw Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains take to the stage. Just listen how, (once he has managed to go through a few customisation options using voice) the band kicks in and responds to his playing.
🙂
Not just handbrake turns – GTA V
The original Grand Theft Auto was a great game. A top down scroller with cars that had very pleasing handbrake slides as you zoomed around the city in a sort of glorified PacMan variant. That sells it a bit short but as the creators called it that once I think I can :).
There is a complete history here on Games Radar.
I loved the top down scrolling car action not least because I had written a few demos along that sort line.Not least the cars game that was part of the developer kit with the old firms “BIG” proof of concept for in game micro transactions back in 2004 (yes they should have stuck with it but what can you do !)
So when the 3d versions of GTA started to produce more variety, but definitely keep that level of fancy driving it was fantastic.
I always have marvelled at the size of the free roaming worlds in many of the games. They just get bigger and bigger. They are not random either they are designed, intricately designed! The entire metaverse now though becomes a backdrop for narrative, not just sliding around. The good thing is though, you can ignore the story and just have some fun razzing around in cars listening to music.
If you are not a gamer and you have not watched this new video of Grand Theft Auto V the fifth installment and the latest and greatest I urge you to give it a look. Just to get a feel for the scale of these games. I am sure GTA V will not disappoint, they have just got better and better, more and more varied. They are a fantastic achievement in games and technology too.
Wow for Wimbledon, a champion and some 3d printing !
I was going to write another reminiscing post about Wimbledon and the fantastic teamwork and effort that goes into delivering the tech there but I though I would be repeating myself.
However this year I can’t not mention Wimbledon for several reasons. The first is of course Andy Murray winning the whole Championship. The serendipity of it being 77 years since a brit won, combined with it being 7/7 that’s a lot of lucky numbers in a line 🙂
The predlets had got very into the tennis this year, but had forgot, or never been there to remember the 10 years I got to sit in the bunker there with the old company. They wanted to hear what it was like and some of the stories. One of them said “Dad, do you miss it?”. My honest reply was yes of course I miss the event and team of people that delivered it all. What I didn’t miss was the constant battles before the Championships that everyone who works there suffers. Wimbledon is a few weeks of intense work, generally in the corporate side of things it is not regarded as billable. There are some full time sports events guys and marketing people, but most of the UK team were willing volunteers and experts trying to carve time out of the normal work to do something high profile, risky and exciting. That meant anyone who was in control of your time felt they lost you for a few weeks. It also meant there were other people who may have felt jealousy or envy at the teamwork and comradeship the event still creates. Once the event is on people are pretty much locked in and doing something time dependent and high profile so have to be left alone. Once the event is done there can be some retribution, though at the same time people that have done the event are in high demand to be wheeled out in front of customers as a trophy expert. So the pattern is pretty much “you are not doing this… oh you are doing it…. well you shouldn’t…. can you please help us on this project with the expertise you have gained it will make the customer happy. Repeat.
The resilience of the guys and girls still managing to get there and do the job despite everything is as impressive as the effort itself. I hope the aftermath, with a british winner, is slightly softened though I suspect the any jealousy of the fact you were there when “it” happened may cause a noses to be put out of joint. 🙂
However, the thing this year that I was impressed about was that someone, somewhere had managed to get 3d printing into Wimbledon (something I didn’t manage in my time there though I did try 🙂 )
There are taking the data analytics and some social media feedback and 3d printing data souvenirs based on that “demand”.
I had somehow missed this as I was following more of the tennis matches this year than the press for the first time in a long while. So thanks to Andy Burns, who has managed to fight the wimbledon fight for some many years he may get his own statue, for changing his facebook profile picture to a 3d printed trophy which made me sit up and take notice.
Well done who ever managed to persuade someone to do something with this. A kindred spirit who I hope has had and will continue to have as much fun, sweat and tears at Wimbledon as many of us have had.
Adventures with Photon and Unity3d
The unity3d hospital I have been working on has, up to now, been running on the Photon Cloud. (Photon server from Exit games is a socket server that allows client applications like those in Unity3d to talk to one another. They run a simple to use hosted version called Photon Cloud which is great for testing things out.
I decided though that some of the traffic we were pushing through might break the tiers for hosting on the cloud so thought I would run my own server. It was not the concurrent user as we have a few users, but they do a lot. Rather than a lot of users doing a little which is the general profile for gaming.
In part that is because on of the unity clients acts as the master for the application. It holds a lot of simulation data and changes to that have to be communicated (in various cached ways). If I had built it as server logic we may have cut down on traffic but would have to stick to a single way of working. As it is the application is also designed to fall back to disconnected mode and can be run as a non network demo (though that has its own challenges).
I did have a few difficulties to start off with but many of those were actually very simple to solve, and if you read some of the annotations in the docs they all make sense.
I sparked up a rackspace windows 2008r2 server first. Photon is windows based. I had dabbled with the Azure cloud hosting version for it but much of that required a windows development environment to deploy to and I am a Mac user with occasional windows use 🙂 So it was much simpler to have a rackspace server and use the remote desktop to attach to it.
Downloading the files via the remote desktop was a problem to start off with due to all the various firewall restrictions, so there was a bit of clicking around windows admin.
I followed the 5 minute setup (kind of). Once downloaded you just end up with a set of bin directories for the Photon control and directories with the various server applications and configurations.
All I needed was a lobby host and then simple game rooms to hold broker the data flow and RPC calls. I had not extra server logic. If something moves in unity3d on one client it needs to move on the other.
I didn’t have much luck having asked photon to start the Default application. I was not getting connected so I added a few extra firewall rules just to be on the safe side. I was starting to wonder if I could get to the hosted machine at all but I think there were some other network problems conspiring to confuse me too.
Then I read that if you are switching from Photon Cloud to your own server you should use the other application configuration, cunningly named Loadbalancing(MyCloud). I switched to that and ran the test client on the actual server and things seemed better. Still no luck connecting from unity3d though. Then I looked at the menu option that said Game Server IP config. It was set to a local address, so obviously the server was not going to be letting itself be known to the outside world. A simple click to autodetect public IP and I was able to connect from unity3d.
It all seemed good until after a few connects and disconnects it started to throw all sorts of errors.
I had to ask on the forum and on twitter, but just asking the question I started to think what I was actually doing and what I was running. I was glad of the response from Exit Games though as it meant that I was going along the right path.
Again it is obvious but… The mycloud application config that I was using had 1 master server and 2 game servers it did say it was not for production, but as this is not a massive scale game I thought I wouldn’t touch any configs. It looked like the master server was getting to a point of asking each game server who was the least busy (to direct traffic to) and getting an answer that they were both maxed out. I initially thought I needed to add more game servers, but it was actually the opposite. Removing one of the game servers from the config (effectively removing and load balancing logic) meant the same game server got the connections. The loadbalancer is really there for other machines to be brought into mix.
Having thought that was what was happening I cut the config files but still found after 30 mins running I got conflict. I did say that in the forum post too. However I had not fully rebooted the windows box only restarted the photon server. I think there is a lot of shared memory and low level resources in play. A few reboots and restarts and things seem to be behaving themselves.
The test will be today when the scenario is run with several groups of 5 users, but all running voice too.
I have put some server fallback code in though to allow us to switch back to the Photon Cloud if my server fails. For a while I was publishing two version one for cloud and one for my server. That was getting impractical as each upload on my non infinity broadband was taking 45 mins. So any changes had a 90+ minute roundtrip not including the fix.
The future of food, flies, soup and printed pizza – Flush Issue 8
The new issue of Flush magazine has just gone live and this time I joined in the food theme of the magazine.
As usual thankyou to @tweetthefashion for putting together such an amazing looking publication. I also know this was a bit of a trauma with some of the tech and file corruption all playing their part. It is there now though 🙂
Page 87 on is my little contribution.
Being a company called Feeding Edge I always thought I would give myself the opportunity to move to a food based business or set up a restaurant. However this was an article about new types of food, the challenges we have for feeding the planet and some of the science and art of food that is coming to light.
I often put little tag lines into sections and my favourite was “waiter there is a fly in my primordial soup” in the section about farming algae for food.
It is probably not for the squeamish, but it is the first time I have combined Candy Crush, Michelin Starred Noma, the UN, insects, “organic side streams”, Danny Baker and 3d printing into a single article 🙂
Anyway see what you think.
The full magazine is here and you can download or read it in any number of forms. It joins the ever growing portfolio of subjects on my writing page
Each of these often end up as a talk too, so I guess I best get keynoting whilst you read the apple news stand version too:)
Goto; Amsterdam part 2 of 2 –Some Choi then Makers gather
Day 2 (part 1 is here) of Goto started very early in the morning for me. I woke up and thought, hmmm I should do my Choi Kwang Do stretches and patterns, not realizing it was only 5am. Still it made me feel pretty good after the slightly heavy night out previously. Conferences are weird time shifts too, the intensity of being in conference mode needs something to balance it and this did. Besides I was going to be talking about Choi in my presentation and I had not been to class since the Saturday. It was now Wednesday!
So I entered the morning keynote pretty refreshed and ready to hear some interesting things.
The twitter wall was up and running again, as were my tweets. The wifi was rock solid the whole conference too !
First up was Martin Fowler, author of many books I have owned and read on patterns, UML etc. He had picked a couple of his talks that he has in his kit bag. For pure software engineers these were probably very useful. Schema’s still being there when there is no Schema made sense as at some point anything needs a structure put on it.
The tracks for the day were, It’s all about the people, stupid, Agile Closing the Loop, Hard Things Made Easy, Mobile, Case Studies, Legacy Systems and our Emerging interfaces track.
I stuck with the It’s all about the people, so that I could hear Linda Rising (@risinglinda) talk again. She talked about the power of the agile mindset. This was nothing about the Agile development approach, but really about human motivations and how they get messed up depending how they are addressed. Linda cited an experiment that gave an easy test to a group of students. After the test the group was divided into to by a subtle difference. This was not revealed until the rest of the story had been told. Instead Linda introduced Fixed and Agile thinking groups. Fixed being of an attitude that any task, intelligence, talent etc cannot be improved, you stick with what you have got and make the most of it, versus an agile mindset that is not fixed but is intrigued and motivated by the challenge and the effort aiming to improve.
In the story the fixed group were asked if they wanted to take a new easy test or a new hard test. They all chose easy again. The effort/agile group chose harder tests, thriving on the challenge.
There were several elements to the research that had been done that Linda recited, but it showed that the fixed mindset tends to measure itself against others being worse, assuming it can’t improve it maximises others flaws. The agile mindset looked for challenges, understood that failure was a learning experience and enjoyed the entire process comparing only to themselves and wanting to coach others to join them.
Now it turns out the only difference in the groups in the experiment was that the fixed group were handed their results and told that they were very clever. The agile group was handed the results and told they must have worked very hard. There are lots of examples of this but also that the fixed thinking tends to be destructive. The “rank and yank” approach of Enron and other corporates that seek to measure and find “the best” cut the others out etc. which leads to a set of people only wanting to not be in the bottom of the pool. This was compared to organisations like Southwest Airlines who seek to grow people, help them get better at whatever they do.
This is all out there in research, that is obviously ignored as it is a bit scary. However, linking back to my morning Choi exercises, in CKD there is no competition.We all want to learn, we want to grow and improve ourselves and help others. Nothing is ever wrong, it is a way to learn to do it better. Instructors are helped to understand how ti give positive re-enforcement and to praise effort. I don’t often hear “you are brilliant” used about people in the art, instead “that was a great effort”. Find you limit and push a little past it, then a little more. Just strive to get better not be the best. it is so simple and effective and it works.
(It has got me pondering an evolution of my blended learning piece of the pitch that features CKD and dive more into the similarity with how to do any good team growth and nurturing based on the CKD experience.)
The next presenter was Simon Brown on Sustainable competence – the people vs process and technology. This was more of a consulting experience presentation, but about the same subject. How and where it works to let people take an agile approach. It also was important to point out that Agile as a buzzword did not mean quick nor sort it out without the complications of design, build and test. In fact the examples were all of how teams that trust one another and are self organised take time. It is something that needs to be trusted to get on with itself. I had flashbacks to previous teams and how we tried to do that (without the Agile word). Always a corporate control freak would try and crush it at the wrong time.
A spot of lunch and then it was me. 50 minutes of cool stuff collective, games tech, 3d printing etc. It is my same slide deck, in a slightly different order but it is here and if you were there it might make sense 🙂 I felt the crowd were engaged and enjoying it. There were some interesting shows of hands, or not to some of my questions to see who did what where. 80% of people knew about 3d printing but the viral nature of reprap was a surprise to many.
I was really glad that all of us presenting had some freaky and interesting things to say but in particular next up after I had shown some custard pies being thrown (usually quite hard to follow) Daniel Hirschman @danielhirschman had more than enough to follow that madness. He has several angles to his work. As an artist and physical designer he has a different perspective to developers. However he also wants the world to learn to code, to be a maker to hack. This is a very cool combination. He is a fan of the Arduino and of processing, and builds real things with it.
This was fantastic, all built with arduino and some other hacks to make a corner shop a musical instrument for a beer advert by his company Hirsch and Mann ltd. Check out the other work, like the Turin interactives at the science museum.
However he also showed lots of the work too of his educational company Technology Will Save Us that makes kits with arduino and alike to let kids or any makers play with an idea and build some interesting things. His final mad example was Bright Eyes. Which he got a kickstarter going for and raised some funds
(We speculated that Andy Piper would have been one of the backers, and yes he is :))
These came out later at the party. They were very popular.
We then changed tack to several lightning 10 minute talks. We had kinect for shop windows being demoed, Dan (@mintsource) showed a clever web sockets sort of local network distributed pub quiz with real prizes. I missed out by 1 point on a prize grrr. Dan also showed Leap motion working.
I did a quick piece on Unity3d and hospitals it was great to be able to talk a bit about code and how it worked. For my own brain it was good but also to not just be the crazy virtual world guy 🙂
It was a maker fest really 🙂 It all seemed to fly by and lots of people wanted to talk afterwards to it seemed to hit the nail on the head.
I had not mentioned this conference had lots of breaks, good 30 minute ones. Not a quick 10 minutes to dash to the next talk, but ones to stop, chat, reflect etc. It’s pacing was really good. They have been doing it a while though.
The final keynote was different in that we all stood up. The chairs had gone. The speaker was Mike Lee @bmf He was talking about the App universe after the big bang. It was a war story presentation, and he admitted to being a bit jet lagged after the alternative WWDC conference he had run. He is ” Mayor of Appsterdam” and brought a typical ebullient American delivery but blende with a love of the art and culture in Amsterdam. His main thing was “don’t make games” basically he was saying it is not going to make you rich and it is too hard. He is making games, he is suffering for his art. He managed to get his plug in at the end, but as it is an educational game, or at least one that tries to blend learning and fun it is worth a look. It was entertaining and depressing in equal measure, but finished with the line “lets go drink beer”.
We all stayed at the venue for a while as it was meet the speakers time, and as a speaker I was there to be met 🙂
Then it drifted back to what must have become a very expensive bar bill at the hotel.
As mentioned the Brighteyes came out, but the also went head ot head with a Google Glass rig (and won)
It was also very cool that the father of OTI and VisualAgeSmalltalk and Java Dave Thomas also took to them 🙂
Anyway I had some awesome chats with people, made some great contacts, enjoyed what I heard and had a great trip.
So thankyou again Gotocon and trifork
Goto; Amsterdam part 1 of 2 – Software engineering is changing
I was really happy to be asked to both attend and speak at this years Goto; conference in Amsterdam. I just got back and whilst I had been tweeting (probably a little too much) from the conference I thought I would try and distill a few things that I noticed and felt about the whole thing. Firstly thanks to Dan (@mintsource) for inviting me along, we were on the emerging interface track and so it was the mad end of software engineering, but as with all emerging stuff as we know, it’s the future.
The venue was the old corn exchange right in the heart of Amsterdam, a very impressive structure and has been modernised inside in some interesting ways that do actually fit.
Our track was in the glass cube inside the brick frame 🙂 A cool space (though a little warm 🙂 )
I knew what our track was going to be like but I have not been to a pure software engineering conference for a long time. Times have changed.
The first keynote was from the wonderful Linda Rising. @risinglinda talking about Incentives: why or why not?”. She is a very inspirational figure as she explains the path she has taken in tech and now even more so in dealing with people not process and into the realms of neuroscience. Not as a researcher but as a student. She also explains she may seem an odd person to see at a tech conference for various demographic reasons. This talk was the start of something I was surprised to see addressed quite so much. The importance of actual people, doing actual work and their motivations to do that. Linda pointed out the amount of real research that indicates certain well held corporate beliefs in what motivates people are pretty much wrong. Taylorism seems to have got hold and taken hold everywhere. Several other books were mentioned including The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
Also the Pygmalion of Management HBR research showing that people clearly make a first impression and when they are managers they manage to that impression of someone. Which is of course detrimental all around.
Obviously with slightly rebellious and provocative attitude to the ridiculous practices in corporate life that I have often challenged she was speaking to the converted. We had a good chat after the presentation at one of the breaks and I was very much looking forward to her next talk the following day. As I have been busy reading (yes actually reading) Thinking, Fast and Slow
We then split off into tracks. The Rise of Educational Startups, HTML5 Rocks Javascript, Big Data NOSQL search, software craftmanship and bring your own language.
As usual you can’t go to everything. I stuck with the rise of education startups and with HTML5 and Javascript. The former because I do a lot of that sort of thing, the latter because I wanted to see what the high end world of software engineering was saying about the potentially anarchic new web tech.
The first pitch by Matteo Manferdini was a bit of a busman’s holiday as he was pointing out the flaws in educational games that try and have education as an end reward for some play. It did dovetail nicely with the keynote as really this is about rewards or incentives and why anyone would want to do something, including playing a game. He ended up showing the videos that were played at IGBL 2013 too with the never ending bin and the musical stair case. It was also a place for him to tell Jane Mcgonigal (@avantgame) story and also mention Raph Koster and theory of fun. This all made sense, and I was glad to see it being presented as it meant I wasn’t going to be doing my talk to a load of people who had never heard some madness 🙂
The next pitch was Nick Grantham of @fractuslearning asking “Are You Giving Teachers Blisters? – Finding the Right Fit for an EdTech Startup”. being an Aussie who lives in Ireland he had a suitably different presentation. Relating education to shoes. The wrong shoes at the wrong place give you blisters. So chucking in educational tech for the sake of it causes friction, and therefore fails. It was a very good one, some good war stories and consulting style references.
After lunch it was time for HTML5 etc.
Sergi Mansilla started off talking about “HTML5 is the future of mobile” It was really a direct pitch about the new Firefox OS. Not so much as a sales pitch but pointing out the politics of mobile. The walled garden native apps causing all sorts of problems for developers, the lack of open API’s to help use any device in anyway. Also the fact that HTML5 is often thought of as a single thing, just like a simple markup. It is instead a mix and match ecosystem of so many bits and pieces that its flexibility is also its drawback.
Next it was tech royalty time. Douglas Crockford the creator of JSON talked about some code he was working on “Managing Asynchronicity with RQ”. Now this was real code, talking about a set of helper functions to allow multiple asynchronous calls to go out to the world and be composed and returned as results without blocking. Definitions like, call these 3 weather API’s I don’t care which one comes back first, but if one does come back, use that and move on. It was a different model to event driven systems and despite being just code slides it made a nice counterpoint to the other presentations. Well worth checking out.
Finally in the tracks for that day and before the party. Brian Le Roux did a talk “Best of WTFJS”. This was based on him having gathered a collection of weird and wonderful JS bugs and features, work around and hacks. He did the entire thing in a terminal window just typing them 🙂 They all made sense, but were all daft at the same time. It was a great live pitch. One of my favourite pitches too.
e.g. 3 > 2 > 1 returns false 🙂
Anyway it was nice to end on some code but have started on people. Then it was back to people, beer, wine and food for the mid conference party.
However just before that we had another keynote. Eric Meijer gave a dynamic and crazy speech about “A Monadic Model for Big Data”, basically pointing out the huge flaws in the relational database model. It was partly a joke, but not really. It did conclude with the fact that if it works use it, but that there are better and simpler ways that doing a select statement. In particular when you are dealing with live data, it is just there, not a summation of a report of stored information. The web is a huge repository of live data, distributed and now. His example of an earthquake app pointed out that the application was going to find an earthquake as it happened. Not go and lookup the data of yesterdays reports in a relational table 🙂 Anyway it was a buzzing and well done pitch from Mr c#.
Much fun was had by all (and some great chips afterwards too 🙂 )
Part 2 to follow. (actually here it is :))
GOTO Amsterdam 2013 conference
Today I am heading off to the #gotoams conference in Amsterdam. I am really looking forward to this one. I have a whole day to attend tomorrow before giving my blended reality talk on wednesday and also a lighting talk on MMIS.
There is lots more info on the website, and if you are going come and say hi.
GOTO Amsterdam
I am looking forward to the track “RISE OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY STARTUPS” too as that crosses over with what I talk about and work in and with the recent IGBL in Dublin
I have not been to Amsterdam since the 2011 Metameets, which I have some great memories of too being with so many like minded metaverse people at the time
It does mean I will miss a few Choi lessons this week, but as I am talking about Choi (in part) and will no doubt wake up early in the hotel I am sure I will get some practice in for my grading next week 🙂
Hurry up and help me speed up please BT
When we moved house recently, and hence the base for Feeding Edge I was on BT Infinity 70mb broadband. It was great, a great service and fast and reliable. On moving to Basingstoke I checked that the exchange for the house was Infinity enabled, it was. I couldn’t check the property as it didn’t have a BT line at the time.
As soon as we moved in and got a real phone number I ran the checker again. It said May 2013 was the likely time. As May passed it then said June 2013 and now it says “between June 2013 and July 2013”.
I realize it is all down to phone cabinets being enabled for FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet). I can’t even find our cabinet to check maybe that is the problem. It all seems to tantalisingly close to get back to 70mb again, yet registering interest on the BT site may not really be doing anything to make it happen. Maybe a bit less money on the adverts and a bit more on the rollout please 🙂
I am not sure how much there is to do, what the economics of it all are but it must be relatively doable or the checker wouldn’t keep making up a month?
As a business, and a techie one being able to shift data around is really quite important to me. I will be back on the top tariff as and when they sort it out. If anyone knows anyone who can point me at another way to make this go a bit quicker that would be great.
****Update 14/6/13
As I had tweeted about this it was great that @BTcare spotted it and contacted me. As a customer it is great to know that someone is bothering to listen. The answer may eventually not be the one I want to hear, but there is certainly some activity to try and find out a little bit more on the status of any line upgrade. That is really good. Thankyou BT 🙂
**** Update 25/7/13
I got a reply about the cabinet from NGA equiries
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your enquiry about fibre broadband. The current cabinet is full to capacity and in order to increase the capacity we need to install more interconnection cables to the existing telephony cabinet. However, to do this we would normally install a larger casing onto the telephony cabinet to accommodate the cables. Unfortunately, we cannot do this as the local council will not give us permission, as they state the cabinet is in an unsafe permission. Therefore, we have proposed to move the cabinets, but again, the local council are refusing permission for this also. We are continuing to work with the council and I have highlighted your problem in the hope it will add momentum.
As there are people who move in and out of the area, they may also terminate their broadband service, effectively creating spare ports. I would advise that as the engineering work will take some time, that you regularly contact your service provider to see if an order will progress utilising spare port capacity if available at that time.
Regards
NGA Enquiries
nga.enquiries@openreach.co.uk
I am now asking Basingstoke council if that is true or what I can do to sort it.
****update Dec 30 2013.
Having talked to the council it seemed that no planning application had been made ever to upgrade the cabinet. Somewhat frustrated I wrote an email to the (outgoing) CEO of BT. Somewhere along the line it got handed to a very helpful person in openreach. He was able to give me more information on the status and try and get to the cabinet upgraded. Just before xmas 2012 I tried the order system again and this time I seemed to be allowed 70mb Broadband. So I placed the order for completion on 30th Dec 2013. I was a little nervous the website had changed and it was not able to actually tell that the cabinet was full. However, the engineer turned up, installed and it is all working now.
I thanked my contact in openreach, though it may bt the work has yet to be completed it was just lucky someone was moving from BT. So I am happy with this much faster broadband, but hope that any actions will help anyone else.
IGBL – Learning from Games Based Learning
Last week I popped over to Dublin for the Irish Symposium on Games Based Learning at the Dublin Institute of technology. It is a few years since I was there last at Metameets listening and talking virtual worlds.
There is a very influential core of virtual world people there and many of them were at the conference so that is alway good to have a real world/SL meetup.
Dr Pauline Rooney from DIT opened up the conference and it felt like I was in the right place.
The opening keynote was by Dr Nicola Whitton from Manchester Metropoliton University. “Game Based Learning in an Age of Austerity”. I then knew I was in the right place because everything Dr Whitton said resonated with some many projects. The key theme was that you don’t have to spend millions of pounds making games for learning, they also don’t all have to be technical deliveries of games. Making a game out of making a game can be as beneficial as putting people through the end product.
She showed an example of the sort of thing that happens in medical sims and games. Lots of huge expensive graphics and realism with a text multiple choice question on the top. Having had to build some things like that, to meet requirements, but having also subverted that with simpler ideas and gaming concepts I was sat there nodding in agreement.
The other point as you can see in the take home points above was that it is ok to play. Humans learn through play and it still gets regarded as not serious enough. Tales of people expecting to put away childish things and then how restrictive their thinking gets when faced with exploring and creating in a playful way.
After a quick coffee I chose to stay in the same room for the next track.
Neil Peirce from Learnovate Centre Trinity College Dublin presented his academic paper “Game Based Learning for Early Childhood“. I did not get so much form this, though I am sure the research was very as really I needed to read the paper. However, this was an academic conference and I am not technically an academic so it was not aimed at me 🙂
I was more interested in “An investigation into utilising a Theraputic Exergame to improve the Rehabilitation Process” where the Waterford Institute of Technology had worked with physiotherapist and used a Kinect, Unity and Zigfu to explore repetition of exercise in the home. This appeared successful, and fitted well with my experience of kinect and how we can broadcast and work together physically using these devices.
Next up was a great Prezi presentation by S. Cogan from the National College of Ireland. He was explaining “engagement through ramification”. Whilst the word gamification is now tired and over used he presented it from a point of view of not knowing what it was, how he was going to use it and shared waht worked and didn’t work in getting the student he lectured to be bothered about class. The positive results were that he had got much better attendance and pass marks, but also that he himself felt a greater sense of achievement making some of the activities more game like. It was very inspirational to hear a younger lecturer looking to change things around a bit, but not completely overturn the system. It all just made sense, and sharing what failed (wrong rewards, too much game in some things etc.) was very refreshing.
After lunch it was 2 hour workshop time so I popped along to “Developing games for Learning using Kinect”. Now I was not sure what to expect, I thought I might be able to help out as well as have a bit of fun myself. I had not fully realized that it was Stephen Howell who is the creator of the very cool Kinect for Scratch. It was great to hear @saorog explain scratch to the audience of mostly non techy people and get them programming in the same way its done with kids, then hit everyone with the simplicity of using the kinect in scratch. It was very well done and very well delivered, he is a clever bloke 🙂 . He also showed us his Leap motion controller in action 🙂
After a bit of Irish culture on the evening.
Followed by almost no sleep as my hotel room had no double glazing so the ongoing partying in Camden Street and the subsequent bottle deliveries pretty much filled all the early morning….
Elfeay and I did out little pitch. “I am a Gamer. Not because I don’t have a life, but because I choose to have many”. We each did a 8 minute chat on how we have found our various tribes, how games and games technology and culture have led us to places that then feed into more games and games culture. My example being the journey in Choi Kwang Do via games and tech, plus a few other things thrown in 🙂 It provoked some good workshop style discussion too. It was also great fun to do in that format and huge thanks to Elfeay for getting it all on the roster 🙂
It also dovetailed nicely into some Pecha Kucha sessions where slides are timed and there are a given number in a given time slot. It is almost the presentation equivalent of a vine or a tweet. Concise, well planned to fit and delivers a lot in a small package.
Dudley Turner from University of Akron in the states did a great piece of “developing a quest-based game for university student services”. Making the discovery of what is available to new students on campus through a mix of alternate reality pieces of information like emails and mini websites linking a narrative to real world tresure hunting using Aurasma AR location specific tags to get them to places. It is all part of a course that they have to take anyway, but this gets them out and about and engaged with the places they need to be at, not just reading and looking at maps.
The next was P.Locker presenting “The snakes and ladders of playing at design:Reflections of a museum interactive designer, game inventor and exhibition design educator”. This was refreshing as it was not really about the tech end of things, but the core of play and interaction. Physical installations and how being a board game designer helped create museum pieces and teach others how to make them. There are elements of practicality and robustness in the physical aspects to consider as well as the learning aspects.
Finally, last but by no means least, S. Comley the University of Falmouth talked about “Games based learning in the Creative Arts”. It was surprising to hear that arts were not heavily involved in the use of games in the learning process. It seems human nature to stick with what you know hits everywhere. It will be interesting to see where her research takes her, as this was a precursor to a much bigger piece of work, stating the problem and the potential benefits. In particular to get cross discipline interaction in academic arts.
That was it for the main tracks. I missed a lot as lots was on at the same time but it was all brilliant.
It ended with a keynote from Fiachra O Comhrai from Gordon Games. “Using game science to engage employees and customers in the learning, knowledge sharing and innovation process”. What was interesting here was that Gordon Games was formed by non gamers. Mr Comhrai said he formed the company then decide to look at some games. I felt slightly uneasy at that, but good on them for doing it anyway. As a long time gamer where I both play and analyze what is going on it felt that my 40 years of gaming experiences was being summed up as something that you pick up in weekend on xbox. I am not sure that is what he meant. Also much of their work is in call centres, though we did not get to see many examples of Gordon Games, we did get to see some fun videos from other people.
After that some of us Second Lifers headed off for lunch before I dived into a taxi and headed home.
Here we all are looking very shifty 🙂
@elfeay @acuppatae @inishy @d_dreamscape @iClaudiad
So thankyou Dublin and thankyou everyone at the conference it was a blast and very inspiring to be with so many clever and passionate people.