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(Brett) Welcome everyone. Sorry for the
little bit of delay there. We have a new camera, we're just trying it out here. My name is
Brett Bixler. I am the lead instructional designer with Education Technology Services.
Can you hear me in the back? I need to speak up more.
This new air conditioning system makes it a little bit difficult. So, if my voice
fades or the voice of my colleague fades, just let me know. I'm here to day with
Bart Purcell from IST. He and Chris Stubbs are also part of
the initiative that we've named the Educational Gaming Commons at Penn State.
We started this, it's been awhile ago, we conceptualized
it, I'm gonna say at least two years ago, and we started talking about it and talking about it. And so
we're here today with whole bunch things that we've done and we want to show you.
And we tried to figure out ways to make this interactive and we thought we'd make you fight for
pizza, but we didn't think that was such a good idea. We do have a game that we want show you
that's a work in progress. And towards the end of presentation then Bart's
gonna bring that up and we'll show it to you. It's a really neat game called Ecoracer, which is
about learning about alternative fuel sources and making intelligent decisions
about using fuel. So without further ado,
Why
should we even do this? Well there's a couple of reasons.
Interest is really big in academia
in games. And one of reasons Bart and I first started talking about this is
there's a lot of people at Penn State,
professors, instructors, and so on that are interested in games and using games in their
classroom or in their learning environments. But they're scattered. They're all over
the place. There's some here. There's some there. And they're really not talking to
each other. And we thought wouldn't it be neat if we could use the technologies that we have just to bring
them together, if nothing else, to bring them together and have some synergy there.
So there's a lot of interest there. There's a lot interest across the country in games as well.
Business and industry is very interested in gaming.
Big corporations like Google, for example, are starting to look at applicants resume's
to see if they have gaming experience. And they're not looking at to see if
they can hang out with them at work and they can play games. They're looking at gaming in terms of
teamwork. In terms of collaboration across
distances where you might not be face to face. They're looking for those sorts of things.
So businesses and industry are really interested in it as well as
academia. So there's a number of opportunities out there for people and especially
students that are gamers that might work out later on in their careers.
There's a number of projects already underway at
Penn State. There's several going on here. There's numerous ones all
over the country that have to do with educational gaming. Quest Atlantis is one
which is really neat. There's just a plethora of
things out there that are happening in this space. So it kind of behooves Penn State
to have at least one foot that door to see what's going on and try to stay current with what's happening
else where. Penn State does
have a very solid technological infrastructure. And I know because I've been traveling the
different Big Ten universities the last six months or so.
We're second to none. And some of you in this room, you know, kudos
to you, because you're the ones that help make that happen. There's definite research
value and there's things I would've never thought of. You know, one of the
things we'll talk about later on, is we've been talking to some music faculty about using Rock Band or Guitar
Hero, which for those of you that might not be familiar with that, you actually strap on
this play guitar and you have to hit things in time
to the music. Well music faculty are looking at that in terms of
getting people to understand basic rhythms and basic musical concepts.
Wouldn't have occurred to me, and I'm a musician, but it makes a lot sense
once they explain it to me. So let me
keep going, oh, I have a mystery man here, he's got a mic.
Thanks skip. You might have heard
them called Serious Games as well. And that's a term
that came out, what, around eight years ago.
And there's a lot of debate whether they should be called Serious Games or not. But you'll still
hear that. If you're looking on Google or whatever and you come across something called Serious Games,
that's what this whole things about. Games to teach.
Games designed for non-entertainment purposes as well.
And they can be used for a number things. Games can be used
for just basic awareness. They can be used for social change. There's one out
there now called Ice, which is downloadable and I think,
something about I can, it has to do with immigration.
It has to do with the immigration laws. And it's really designed to produce
an effective change in the play area. So that you come in there and everyone
thinks, all immigration laws, yeah, we don't think much about them. You get to take the role of
a person that is an illegal immigrant and is being chased by the
Feds and you get to see what happens when you're detained
and the conditions and all that. And it does make you stop and think.
So they're used for that. They're being used for advertisement all the time.
You know, movies come out with these little mini games they stick on,
people that produce movies, stick them on the Web. All the TV shows now
have these games and so on. They're being used to sell products basically.
And then of course education. (Bart) And we're starting to see a lot of political games too.
So a lot of candidates are putting out specific games they're
trying to illustrate, kind of where their stance is and things like that. So that's gonna
continue, I'm sure, for the next year or so. (Brett) And that's true.
The other thing that we do beside gaming with EGC, is we do stuff with virtual worlds.
Virtual worlds like Second Life. And a lot
of candidates will go into Second Life and they'll do a presentation in there and they'll big
presence in Second Life with avatars and so on. We started looking
around to see what else was happening in the CIC. There's three institutions that we know of that
have a fairly strong presence in this area. Ones Michigan State University,
the other one is Wisconsin, and...aah!
That better? (Audience) Yes! (Brett) Alright!
(Bart) And one interesting thing here to point out with Michigan State, they actually have a Serious Games
master's degree program. So Carnegie Melon
has Entertainment Technology master's program. And a lot of these are focused around
kind of games in what's called media literacy that involves games, video,
the bash of media that we're dealing with today.
(Brett) And there's the MIT Educational Arcade as well, which has been
around for, how many years, five or six years? Five or six years.
So you can see from this, this is a reflection
of kind of what we're trying to do. There are some serious players in this space.
(Bart) And kind of the big thing that we're trying to do here is, at the
institutional level. Most of these other organizations, these other universities, these
are stuck within Phd departments, master's degree departments. They're kind
of embedded within different groups on those campuses. So we feel we've taken
a unique approach here and trying to do this at the central level to support everybody on campus
versus being embedded with instructional systems or embedded within the College of Ed.
So we feel our approach is a little unique. (Brett) And again, the whole
idea is to get these different disciplines talking to each other. We think because we sit outside
specific discipline that will enable us to be better
facilitators. Because we're not entrenched in one mindset from one
college or department.
We already talking about this. There's a disjointed community. There's really a lack of expertise
in certain areas. There are some places that
have great ideas, but they don't have the technical background to link the games. There's other places that
have the technical background, the skill sets, they can call on students.
But they might not have the design expertise. So there's these isolated
pockets. I mean that's what the EGC is about. Defining
program. We really don't have one at Penn State. And of course there's lots
of policy questions that go on. One of the things that we're working on is
a lab space and we'll talk about that, but what happens when somebody gets injured
in this lab? If they're using Wii where they're swinging stuff around. I mean we have to worry
about stuff that I never even thought about. (Bart) And even consoles on the network
in an Xbox authenticate, a lot of these things that have come up, that I would've never dreamed of.
But a lot of people here in this room are helping us work through right now. (Brett) Yeah, we're all scratching our heads.
on a lot of this stuff. So the solution is the Educational Gaming Commons.
Yeah, okay, so we had that
and it will begin in July 2007. I think we'll really begin before that, but
that was official. We got word that, you know, spend some time on this
and work it out. And we want to promote and build awareness.
We want to facilitate the use of the games.
And we want to build community and we wanted to assist
in the design and the development of games. So one of things we did in that area is
he's not here today, but we hired, I don't think Jason's here, I don't see him,
we actually hired a programmer, Jason Wolfe, and he works down at ETS now.
He's the full-time on the EGC project and
he came from a background, he was not only a gamer, but
he was a gaming programmer and working on Microsoft Dolph and a couple other programs.
Very interesting fellow. If you get a chance to meet him and talk to him. He has all sorts of great ideas
and he's really into mobile gaming and he actually has some patents out on some mobile gaming
technology. So an interesting guy to work with.
Well, and I mentioned the rest of us. So we have myself, we have
Jason, we have Chris Stubbs, sitting over here in the corner, and Bart.
And as you can see, my times not on there,
I'm about sixty to seventy percent I try to work on it. Jason's full-time.
But Chris is twenty and Bart's twenty-five. So we're trying to get a lot done with
the resources that we have. That's a challenge in and of itself.
We do have a steering committee that consists of
a number people both within ETS and throughout the university. Pat Besong
is one multi media developer down in ETS.
Myself, Darla Lindberg in Arts and Architecture, who's really
been interested in gaming and gaming activities
and game theory for a number of years. Bart, as I mentioned. Mary Ramsey who
you all know, is in the back of the room. Couldn't do it without you Mary when it comes to the lab.
She's been tremendous help. Brian Smith out of IST
who's a big gamer, interested gamer. If you've been with our
Symposium or something, you've seen pictures of him holding a guitar with Bart playing the guitar.
And then Steve Thorne who in Liberal Arts is just
a really big advocate of gaming and just has tons of ideas about using games
for team building and language and learning. If you ever get the chance to talk to Steve,
make sure you at least have forty-five minutes because once he starts, he'll just keep going.
Good folks to work with.
I call these kind of like, even though there's four things listed there, I call these the three
legs of the stool for the EGC. And the first one is this community hub, which
you can say well it's just a website, but it's really more than that. Because people can
contribute to it. It's a Drupal site. So people can come in there
and they can add their own blog space if they want to and they can write in there.
We can set up community events through there. We have a calendaring system and so on.
Number of blog spaces. This is where we'll publish
any of the games that we actually produce we'll at least be able to get to them through this
space. But I think the most important thing for the hub is this
affiliate program, it's just an exploit there. And the affiliate program, again, you can look at it and say,
well, it's just a database where people go in and they fill out their information.
Who I am, what my expertise is in gaming, what I'd like to do, that sort of thing.
But that's the real simplistic view, the actual purpose of that,
is to bring these different people together. So I'm
sitting here and I'm a professor in, say, education, and I have this really great idea for a game, but I
really need to talk to somebody maybe over in communication because it has those aspects. The idea
is I can go to this affiliate program, which is a database, and go there and look up
and find out is there somebody in communications that has this expertise with
action games that also might know, you know, heaven forbid,
might have some Java Scripting because I think I need that. And the idea then is you can find
this match, you can get together and start to talk. How might we be
involved at the EGC? Maybe not at all. I mean it might just be that we're the facilitators
or the catalyst that bring those two together. It might be that they want to come to us
and try to flush some ideas out. And it might be that the ideas
that they come out with it and the run off on their own, and they do. Or they might come back to us and say,
we need you're help to build this. And that point we get involved with Jason and
maybe Chris and some other people and actually help conceptualize some stuff. (Bart) And we have
a Facebook group too that kind of started before our affiliate program started and
we found people were using that in the same fashion. Via the Facebook group, we had
people in communications meeting people in IST that, you know, have similar
interests that may have never known that other person existed on campus.
So we're trying to figure out ways down the road how to integrate some Facebook features
and things like that into this as well. (Brett) The other big
leg of the stool and it's consuming all my life right now, is this EGC lab.
We have space over in 6A Findley, which
has some historical significance in that, I guess, it was the first micro computer
lab on campus when Gary Auguston opened it up in '87 or '88.
It's an interesting space. We'll talk about
that in a little bit. Then we have these engagement projects where
right now it's kind of by invitation where we're
looking at faculty that have been talking with us for a number of years or have a project or want to do something
and the idea is that we'll work with them
from start to finish. Get it conceptualized. Build it. Get it out the door and
actually assess it. And we're gonna show one of those in a little bit.
In fact we have Peter Idowu who is here, Peter raise your hand, wave at everyone,
Peter's are first engagement project for Ecoracer. So we'll be showing that in a little bit.
He actually brought that to us from Harrisburg. He had started it,
and gotten to the point where his programmer/
student had left and wanted to finish thing off, so we
took it and we're flushing it out. Talking with Peter and we've been meeting
with him and so on. And then we're doing events. I mean this counts as an event,
I guess. Bart's organized a virtual worlds Brown Bag lunch
about every month. We skipped this month. Then we do demonstrations
and seminars. We've done...There was a National Gaming Library Day
was it six weeks ago or something like that? We
went there, we set up, awful hot down in the basement.
But we set up Rockband. We set up a whole bunch of things. For about five hours
people just came and they played games and we talked to them and so on.
That's the idea. Those are the legs of the stool.
The website contains the database that I told you about. There's blogging.
We'll put the projects up there. I'm not gonna read through all these. But you can see the idea
we're trying to make this more of a Web 2.0 website. It's not just some place
where you go and look, you know, maybe every year and see if the information
hopefully it's been updated by someone. The idea is that community will help build this site
and help transform and help keep it going.
So the current projects we're working on
some of them are kind of no brainers. PSU Jeopardy,
and PSU Hangman, which we keep trying a couple different names for Hangman.
But those were two games that were already pretty much in existence and we
just needed to take them and kind of bump them up the next level and get them out the door.
I don't think they're the icing on the cake as far as what we're gonna do,
but they are very good for a number of reasons. And one is
they're easy for faculty to understand. Because they're the type of games, when faculty think of games,
they think of games like that. And the other thing is for faculty that are teaching
two hundred, three hundred level courses where there's a lot of fact and
concept acquisition that has to occur, this type of
games are great for after instruction, you know, drill and practice.
I call it drill and kill. The idea is you can go into these games and play them over and over
and if you need to learn the
five major rivers in Saskatchewan or something. They're great for that sort of thing.
Ecoracer, we're gonna show and talk about in a little bit.
And I mentioned that that's a game for alternative energy sources, which is really cool.
And then the other thing that I did mention before is we actually started
before the gaming stuff, we actually started with virtual worlds. And we have
an active and growing presence in Second Life. Which is
currently the biggie in virtual worlds. At least as far as educators. There's
a lot educators in that. And that space continues to grow.
We have a number of current engagement projects in them. Most of them
have finished, but the faculty are kind of doing round two. And I'm trying to help them
out wherever I can. So we have, and this is really weird,
because I own two islands, but I have an island Penn State Isle and Penn State Isle 2.
Bart is coordinating ISTania and ISTania 2.
There's a faculty member that has an island for Penn State Berks.
And Outreach/World Campus has their own island.
in it. So we have a big grid. We're starting to form our own
minor continent. It should be interesting. Some of the things that
have come out of there. Some of things that will come out of there in the future. Language learning
again, something I never think of virtual worlds. Gloria Clark down in Harrisburg
just going gang busters with that. She's finding her students
are more fluent verbally. They're writing more
for Spanish. And they're actually able to experience
Spanish life and Spanish architecture by visiting virtual Morocco
and these different, well not Morocco, but
there's something in there like virtual Mexico and those places. All sorts of things
happen in this space. Arts and Architecture
has a virtual Palmer Museum in Second Life. Which they're going to
roll out here in a couple of months officially. It's built and I think it's pretty much ready to go.
But they have a big conference coming up and the idea is people that come
here will be able to either visit the Palmer Museum in person
or if they want to stay at the Penn Stater they can visit it virtually in Second Life.
It's not an exact replica, but if you look at the
architecture of the Palmer Museum and you look at the architecture in Second Life, you'll immediately make
a connection. It's got the columns and the brick and that kind of stuff. (Bart) And it's also very
interesting that students are just finding this. So students that aren't involved in some of my
classes or classes that are actually actively using Second Life as part of the experience,
Penn State students are just finding us in this space. Brett and I
go in once and while just to poke around and work on projects and one of the Penn State students come
up and start talking to us in Second Life that are just...they play
in this space. They goof around here. It's almost like a Lego universe. You can build whatever you like here.
And a lot of students just happen to stumble upon the Penn State space, which has been real interesting to see.
(Brett) And a lot of staff here and administration are stumbling onto this space too.
I just had, I was talking to someone the other day about
would this a good tool for recruitment
and the answer is I think it would be. And not only that the admissions office
already has a space in team version Second Life.
And they have their own Penn State isle and they do a lot of recruitment
events through there. So these things are happening.
I've talked with, you know, it's kind of hit or miss, but there seems like
some article or something will come out about Second Life or virtual worlds
and then Bart and I will be contacted for about three weeks and we'll go and do these little things
and we'll talk about it. So people are interested and they're trying to get their heads around
this 3D space and what it means. (Chris) Just to build too on what Brett was just talking about
with the games, I think, one of the other big challenges we have is trying to pair things properly.
People say gaming and education and I think it's very easy to look at the
whole field and say, well you're trying to replace existing teaching with these games and that's not
the goal. Something like Hangman, you know, for example, is really basic but
that is really good for like Brett was saying, basic recall and things. You get into Rockband
or even World of Warcraft is another game we're looking at using it for different purposes like
language or music appreciation whatever it may be. Ecoracer is a great example
of something that sort of fits in the middle. It's both not
quite commercial level high end production, but it's still got that real fun element to it.
So there's a pretty wide scope of the things that we're looking at doing too.
(Brett) We're gonna play
this in a little bit, but we have a screenshot up here of Ecoracer. So you can see that this is a 3D
environment where you come in and you're able to
set up your car and choose a fuel source. And the idea is as you're going down the track
you're switching between fuel sources because the sunlight might come out and you want to switch to solar
power or it might get windy so you want to switch to wind power and so on. And the idea
there is by playing this game and seeing what the trade offs are between the different energy and that,
Peter can actually have a debriefing moment
with the students after they play the game. It could be live face to face or we talked
about using discussion boards for this or other activity. But the idea
that is to get the students to, after the game is over, to reflect on what they did
and try to come with ideas for intelligent use of energy sources.
Mentioned Hangman
like you can see this is kind of a no brainer, but
like I said, we have eighty percent of the source code already so we thought we would
just finish it off. And again, the idea is that you can go in as an instructor and you can
add your own words to this and so on.
Talked about Penn State Isle. I kind of got ahead of myself when I started talking about that.
So I'll skip that, because I already talked about that.
But here's some things that were conceptualized
and trying to think about. One is this thing called Palmer Mysteries where
we're looking at an exploratory, it might be
GPS or it might be internal transmitters
because I guess GPS won't reach into the building that well. But the idea is you can move
around through the building and you'll have maybe an iPod or some other unit
that will know where you are and give you some information.
You know about the artwork or so on. And we want to tie that into some sort of game-like
format so you're not just stumbling through there and all yeah, that's interesting. But you have a goal in mind.
So you're moving from place to place intelligently. Another one is
Penn State Fantasy Sports, Brian Smith who's one of the steering committee members,
he's been looking at that for a number of years to teach statistics, I think
it is and a couple other things. (Bart) Basic Statistics.
(Brett) And that's kind of neat. Because you're not learning the stuff in abstract. You're learning it and it makes
some relevance. Oh, okay, I understand now
you know, where this RBI index comes from and all that.
And then basic musicianship, we've been talking with some folks in the music department
about Rockband and Guitar Hero and
it's just amazing to me how quickly this technology changes, because we were
talking to them about this and they said, this is really great, but we'd like to be able
to input our own music into it. So they might want to put in
a Chopin medley or something. It'd be kind of weird
doing piano stuff on the guitar, but set that aside
the idea of them being able to customize it. And we're like, well, I don't think that's really possible.
Then about two weeks later, there's a big announcement, so you're gonna be able to customize
these environments. You're gonna be able to put your own music into them.
We're starting to investigate that and see what the possibilities are there.
[ silence ]
And talked a little bit about the lab, it will be a CLC lab, so
if we were just building a lab for students to go to play, I wouldn't call it a lab,
it be kind of like down at the University of Pittsburgh, that Bart and Chris went to a couple weeks
ago, and that's for fee thing and kind of their student union
building. Students pay to go in there and play. If we're doing
that, that to me just wouldn't have any value.
It wouldn't justifiable. But the idea that this a lab that
when it's during open hours, when faculty haven't reserved it, yeah, students can go in there.
They can have fun and play. But the real purpose of the lab
is so that instructors can reserve the lab for a couple of things. Number one,
they could reserve it for teaching moments. Now it's not gonna be a huge space so they might have to
break them up into groups. But more importantly
I think the applied research and data collection, it's gonna be a living lab where they could actually
go in and do observations of students and capture empirical data
off the computers. Don't know about the consoles. That's one of the things
we're trying to work on whether we can capture stuff off them, but definitely off the computers
so that they can get this data and
they can start doing what faculty like to do, which is publish and promote it
and go to conferences and so on and demonstrate the type of learning
that's occurring in empirically sound fashion. Because in academia that's what it's all about.
You can't just say, this stuffs cool and I know my students are learning, you have to prove it.
And talk about the social use, and I think that will be a very interesting
space too, because we've looked at a couple of different areas like Pitt.
There's one down, is it Georgia, that other one
and just tremendous student interest. I mean they really
come in and then they start doing other things besides just playing games. Start talking
to each other about course work and so on. (Bart) And there are some courses in
IST, some courses in Computer Science, some courses in Integrated Arts where they teach a little bit about
game creation. The concepts as well as the technology. But what those
students and instructors don't have right now, is a lab that actually has the game prototyping
tools available. So that's another goal here is to get a lot of these tools
that faculty are already trying to teach in these courses into the lab so they can then have their students
reserve lab space to come in and actually work on game prototypes and things like that.
And then at the end of that we're trying to figure out, you know, can we some how get ahold of those
prototypes and push them out to the Penn State community and things like that and see if it's something that
has some value and something that we want to continue pursuing.
(Question) I was gonna ask, for the lab that you're
setting up, do you have workstations for people who might be doing models for those games?
So if you have someone who's perhaps a [ inaudible ]
is there a workstation available in lab so that they can work on that or would they take it to another lab
and come in and work on the mod? (Brett) There will
be eight computers in here and they will be CLC
computers so they'll have access to whatever software is available in other CLC
labs. So, I don't know, if Maya's in there or not.
There will be PC's.
So anything that's on the CLC lab will be in those labs.
Now right now we're looking at Dell Optiplex, which is
the top [ inaudible ] gaming boxes
but Jonathan Holmes tested them and they run everything that we've
looked at such as World of Warcraft and those sort of things.
Some of those high end graphic, we'll have a good graphics card, but whether they'll be
able to do really super high end rendering without waiting eight hours, I'm not sure.
(Question) And you mentioned on the PC's
that you had a way to record. Are you using like Fraps?
(Brett) Yes, we have a site license now for Fraps. I haven't downloaded it, but I
have it. And that was another interesting thing, because this is a small company from Australia
and the only way you can buy it is through Pay Pal. So in order to get Pay Pal
through the university system, that was interesting, Barb Smith who I work with, she wasn't happy with me.
She had to jump through some hoops to get that thing ordered.
Actually, don't let me forget. Because I do have that. And you probably want it on your machine. So I got the
site license for it, just haven't downloaded it. So in case there's time limit on downloading it.
[silence]
So this is 6A Findley
as we want it to look like. This is not how looks now. But
actually when you come in Findley and you come down the steps, you come down these steps here and you turn left.
This is a smaller room and there's a huge PC lab over in here.
What we want to do, right now there's a door
here and this walls kind of crappy. So what I'd like to do is knock this wall out
and make it all glass or at least half glass with the opening in the middle.
Whether we can do that or not I don't know. But this first section here, this will be
four PC's, four PC's, an LCD panel over both.
With the idea that they can display from here
onto the LCD or my golden
plan is if I can get all the switches taken care of, you can
push video content out from anywhere to anywhere.
We have video consoles or LCD's up here too. Be nice to be able to push them out.
And we also have a ceiling mounted projector that goes up to here.
Again, that's the plan. Just be able to push
from anywhere to any outlet device, but whether we we'll be able to do that or not,
don't know. So we have this space here and that's for
really team based games such as World of Warcraft, or any of these Gears of War
and these things where people might be collaborating together. And this
is really more of a conceptual separation than it is a rule.
What I'd like is some sort of beaded curtain that could be opened and closed. And the idea behind that is not
just so that we could separate these two spaces, but if somebody is over here playing the Wii,
and they don't put the wrist strap on and let go, it doesn't fly over here and hit
someone. That's part of the reason too.
This will be the PC area and this will be like the console
area where this will be the Wii area here.
So the actual Wii would be here and the LCD would be here.
But a couple of people could stand around here. Because you need a lot space for
that because you're moving around. And then these other two
is the PS3 area and Xbox area.
And we won't have traditional chairs in here. We'll probably have beanbag chairs and maybe a couple of those
game rockers that look bent potatoes chips that sit on the floor. So
it'll be a very non-traditional space in a lot of ways. And then like I said, we'll have the LCD's
and so on. Just the logistics of working through this has been a real eye
opener for me. Like this wall doesn't have any power on it so we're trying to figure out
to get power rerouted. Our goal is to have this
up and running by fall. That's our goal.
Any questions on this part of it? I mean this is...there's a lot going
on in this space. Mary and I meet every week and Bart and a couple other people.
We always have lots of good questions for each other. (Bart) And as you could imagine
these devices, these are hot items, they could walk out of this
lab very easily. So that's kind of what we're focusing on now is
how in the world are we gonna secure these? Is there some sort of sign out system we can use?
Is there some sort of RFID? A chip we can put in these things, how in the world do you deal with
controllers, guitars, the discs for the consoles.
(Question) Will it be staffed? (Bart) We're working with Hank Moller
to have some of the CSS people help out with this, but
we're still trying to sort out the sign out, sign in process.
We're hoping we can work with Hank's group to help us with that.
We're talking with the library in a couple of weeks because they have a system already in place
to do sign in and sign out of things. So we're trying to cover all our bases
and figure out what's gonna work for us. (Brett) There is a lab attendant that sits
about here and monitors both spaces. So that
would be the ideal thing. The library would be one. And then Cole
Camplese, the director of ETS, and he just came up with this wild idea, which just might be crazy enough
to work. I don't know if you've travelled lately through airports, but they now have these huge
vending machines that actually serve iPods and other media devices
and the idea, he's working with, I guess, the bookstore, is
to figure out, could we put a device like in where a student could put their ID card in
get the device out that they want, the hand held controller,
Now they wouldn't be checking out a playstation because they'll be locked down cabinets, but
can they check out a hand held controller, then when they're done, can they
put it back into the machine through some sort of return slot and
have it electronically acknowledge that they've done that. It's far fetched, but
if it would work. It would be great. Because it would free up people from having to be there
all the time watching and seeing what's going on. And if it's tagged by their
ID and they don't return it, we could charge them just like you do at the library
if they don't return a book. A crazy idea, but it might be crazy enough to work.
I don't know.
[ silence ]
We're done with what we called Phase I. Till we ran to the end of last year.
Where we established our teams. We got the community hub up and running.
We established the affiliate program. And we really only have about half a dozen
or ten people in the affiliate program.
My question or my request to you is, if you know
faculty or you know staff that are interested in gaming, send them
to this site here and have them sign up for the affiliate program
It's painless. It takes about five minutes. It doesn't cost them anything and the idea is that
we need to build that up to critical mass so people can start communicating with each other.
[ silence ]
And we're really in Phase 2 right now, which is where we've done these presentations
and the Brown Bags. As you can see I'm trying to implement the
affiliate program, even as I speak to you, we're continuing the game
development. We hope to have the low level Jeopardy and
Hangman ready to go fairly soon. And we hope to start beta testing
Ecoracer this summer. That's the plan.
Lab implementation, we continue work on. And of course the idea
just deepen and expand connections with faculty and staff and students.
Because I think students should be a big part of this over all process.
Phase 3 which is
coming up all too soon for us. The lab will be functional. We'll continue to build
programs and it will actually start
some formal engagement project. So with the project we have right now with
Peter was much more informal. A hand shake,
it was a great thing, but we need to formalize the process a little bit so
faculty know what they're gonna get and
we can get assessment data and so on.
And then I like that prototype environments at UP for possible state-wide
solutions. That sounds great Bart.
So, again, there's the sign up to get the affiliates.
And I think that's the last slide.
So questions, comments! Bart's coming, while Bart's switching over here,
so we can get the
game going. We're gonna invite a few people up that actually want to play.
Does anybody have any questions or anything this might take a couple
minutes to get loaded up.
(Question) I have a question that someone mentioned to me
about XNA game studio whether or not
you were going to roll that out? (Bart) Yeah, we are
looking to become part of the XNA creators club.
Which a lot academic institutions are involved in now. So the goal is
to have that on all of those workstations.
(Chris) Originally there was sort of a hope that we'd also be able to get involved
with things like the STK for the Wii and the PS3, but that's a little bit
pricer, and Xbox makes the most sense because it's sort of a PC based
development environment that you can push to the Xbox. So that will probably be our test
bed before we get to all those other things too. (Question) What about some the games
out there that have no cost for developing for their
source kits? I think, well maybe it's only for mods,
but I think STK for the source engine?
(Bart) We're working with Valve Software to have Steam as kind of the game
management system, and all that comes with, well source, comes with Steam as well.
If we can work with Valve and get that in place in the labs.
The source engine will be available to mod and things like Counter Strike and Portal and those types of games.
The other authoring environments, we're not so sure about now. We're still looking into those.
Valve seems to be the first one on the list because they have the authoring environment, plus their whole game
management platform. Which alleviates us having to sign out CD's
for PC's and things like that. (Brett) Yeah, Steam is kind of like,
you coined this one, it's like iTunes for games.
You get a subscription to them. You just download the game to your computer and play it disclessly.
Which a lot of these games you have to insert the CD. So we're trying to get away from that on the PC's at least.
We probably won't get away from that on the consoles, but
at least on the PC's as much as possible we're trying to get away from that. Again, to alleviate
that human factor. You know, I come in, I got to sign up, I got to check this disc out.
I got to check it back in that sort of thing.
(Question) What kind of buy in are you saving
faculty from with this? Are they buying into it? Are they
not understanding how this applies to what they're teaching? (Brett) Well the faculty that
we've been working with so far, I would call the innovators and early adopters.
So they're coming to us. And they have been for a number of years. What we need
to do right now is we need to get the three legs of our stool that I talked
about, we need to get them in place so as you move up that adoption curve you go from
innovators and early adopters, or innovators
you go to the early majority, which is that up slope of the bell shaped curve. That would
be our next target. Those people
they call the early majority, most of them that I've talked to
when they think of games, they're very traditional, they think of Pacman. They think of
Hangman and Jeopardy, which is one of the reasons
why I have some of those in place. So that we have a starting to point to talk with them.
We won't come in and blow them away with here's this
eight hour game, you know, Gears of War or something like that that
you're in there and you're engrossed and you're this soldier.
That their eyes just glaze over. They don't get it. So we need to baby steps.
(Chris) I think one of the other things too Jamie, is that people, faculty
that we've been working with are coming at it from a lot different angles. So for example, the music
faculty that we've been working with, they aren't necessarily sold on the idea of games, but
they see that games are really engaging people. And they think, you know, maybe we can find a way
to take advantage of that. There are people in English Literature, Linguistics,
who have a totally different approach. There are people in IST who think about the technical aspects.
Design and how working a team virtually and things like that.
I think it very much depends on who you're talking to
as to what their take generally is. Just like what Brett's saying. (Brett) I would agree and the
only thing I would like to add to that is one of the reasons I got involved with virtual worlds, way before the gaming
stuff here, was because I was going to these conferences and
I was seeing people that were butching gaming engines because
they wanted to get to the virtual worlds aspect. They weren't so much interested in the gaming aspect of it
where you're running around shooting things. So they'd swap out the gun for
PDA's. Guys running around with.
So there's another aspect there. So that ties into that whole, they're not looking at
games for gaming sake, they're looking at it for what they get out of it and the game is kind of
the method to the madness so to speak. (Question) I'm just wondering
if they saw it as something kind of silly and something not so much as for learning,
but they think of it first as something that students are doing when they should be doing their homework or whatever?
(Brett) I think there are...especially when we get into that early majority. The late majority
for sure. They're gonna be hard to convince.
And that's why we need some convincing cases. We're working on
call it kind of a white paper about gaming and why game and that sort of thing.
There's tons of stuff out there. We want to pull together Penn State
and explain why at Penn State it's so important. (Question) Can I add something to that?
There are a lot of disciplines where, say like, art or
visual culture or art education there are a lot of
professional conferences that are paying attention to virtual worlds and things like that
from an educational standpoint and a cultural engagement standpoint and it's real post
modern education standpoint so I think may be where some other people
are coming to and though they're viewing it through a different lens that sort of nugget
interest is definitely there. (Brett) The other thing is we all
know that the students are changing. The traditional incoming students are changing.
And part of it is they are coming in as part of the gaming culture.
That doesn't mean you're totally justifiable doing
games just for that reason, but if it's a way to reach out to the
students in a method they understand, you should at least explore it
and see where it goes.
Alright, you have another question?
(Question) Well I can sit here all day with questions. I'll ask one last one.
Kind of talking about mods and I don't know whether or not you're gonna make
that more available to [ inaudible ]
kind of present that because that's a much cheaper and faster way to get through
doing a small project. But how about
I always butcher the pronunciation, Machinima,
I can never pronounce it correctly. I can type it, I can't pronounce it.
Are you advocating that use of gaming at all?
Because it is a use of games still. (Brett) If a faculty member came to me
and said they wanted to use the lab or wanted to talk to use about doing that, I'd be all for that
absolutely. Because it's not just gaming, it's art as well.
You know personal expression. Some of the Machinima I've seen just outrageously
great. Yeah, I'd be all for that.
(Bart) We have about ten minutes left. I just want to show you
some things with Ecoracer here. And hopefully, maybe after I run through it, if
somebody wants to give it a whirl, that would be great too. And again, I need to put the disclaimer
on this. This is still in Beta so what you see here
very well can definitely change by the time it rolls out. We have it running through
this Drupal site right now. So instructors or people can basically come in and create
events. So if you have a class of fifty, you can come in and create and event for your fifty students.
And it shows up on this event page here. It's got open and closed date, rankings,
and things like that. This is an event that I created today, the ITS 500.
So you come in here. You create your event. You click on let's race. And there's two versions
here, there's a trial or an official. And the way we have this set up is you can run as many
trials as you want, but once you run an official race, that data gets captured
for your instructor to kind of look at and analyze and things like that. So the idea is
you can practice as much as you want, but you only get one real official race that kind of gets tracked.
They all get tracked, but the official one is what we think the instructors gonna look at the most.
So I'll jump into an official race here.
And then this will launch the game that's installed. And there's a lot of
blank screens kind of with licenses and things right now. And this is kind of
the control scheme. Your typical W A S D controls. And down here
at the bottom there's different energy sources. So depending on what
the wind looks like, we have a wind gauge here. Depending what the suns like,
and these will change. This will spin faster if the wind is blowing faster. There will be clouds that come
in and out and the sun. So depending on what your weather conditions are you want
to kind of swap in those energy sources based on the weather. And you're also in a race too,
so everything is timed. There's a fuel gauge down here. It's kind of hard to see here on the screen in lower
right that will track all your fuel. And Dave Stong made us this,
it's hard to see here in the top left, there's kind of a flower there, and that's
kind of your emission readout. So if you go with combustion fuel, fuel that puts out a lot of
pollutants that flower will start to whither, the petals will start to fall off, and things
like that. So it's imagery that Dave created for us to kind of, instead of just
a basic emission report, we kind of added a little graphical element to it.
[ playing game ]
And this was put together in
a program called Game Studio
that Peter was working in when came to us.
You can see you're running on solar power right now. Down here at the lower part.
Now look there's clouds coming up on the screen. So now I can switch to
combustion. And you go a little faster here. A little harder to control.
And then you can switch back to sun. That will slow you down a little bit.
But it's not so bad on the environment. And we're in Dem mode so I can
hit the button and see actual percents here. We're not sure if we're gonna include the percents or not
in the actual game. But right now it's a little easier when you kind of toggle on the percents
here. (Brett) You're getting better at this.
Lot's of practice earlier. (Brett) He was winning in first place
the first couple of times he played he always ran out of fuel. He'd just blow it.
And the object here
is to not actually to finish in the shortest amount of time, that's a part of it, but
the object is to have the least amount of environmental impact.
And so there's real complicated formula we came up with for scoring that.
(Bart) And we're also working on a feedback piece right now. So you
kind of get and idea just seeing the game. And we want to have the ability for players to come in here
and actually click on their score and actually get some kind of plotted feedback.
So a couple of graphs that actually plotted say the wind energy and plotted the sun energy
and also plotted what they chose and when they chose it.
So they can try to get the better idea of, you know, okay, I should've been using wind here
instead of hydrogen. Or be able to actually look at this and figure out
why they made certain choices. How they could better choices and things like that as they're playing
through this. So does anybody want to give this a whirl?
Any volunteers? Come on up.
It's pretty simple.
[ silence ]
Just use the W
A S D will get you forward, left, right, and back.
[ inaudible ]
Just hit spacebar when you're ready go.
[ playing game ]
(Chris) And as you guys can see the goal in this game isn't to
replace like and energy theory course or something that. The goal is just, this is kind of
simple, fun, competitive way to come in. Learn some basic
concepts about different energy sources, for example,
combustion will make you go faster, but it will take up more environmental damage. You know wind
is unreliable. Solar the same way. But they're less hurtful on the environment.
Hydrogen has it's benefits and drawbacks. The goal is not to replace an entire
instructor with this. It's just to get people out, have fun, learn in a different way.
And create some conversation around it too. Is there anything you want to add?
The car doesn't get destroyed.
No one gets frustrated. That takes all the fun out of it
then. You can't go on the side. You got to try.
[ inaudible ]
Not bad. Not as good as you. Well I had a lot practice.
(Bart) But yeah, as Chris said, you know, we're pitching this as
conversation starter. Almost like when online learning came about a lot faculty
members, a lot instructors were scared, the computers going to replace me in the class.
This is more of a conversation starter. So you can assign students
to play this for an upcoming module that you're talking about in your course
and it just helps spark some dialogue, spark a conversation and by
no means is a complete educational application here.
It's just kind of a conversation starter. A way to get kids interested. Because kids are living in
these game worlds now and just another way to engage them and try and draw them in.
(Question) So is the sun and wind, is it consistent through each run or is it
random? (Bart) The way we have it set up is for each event its consistent.
So when I actually go in to create an event,
you can actually set wind parameters. You can set a lot of these parameters
as the instructor. And then the first time you race it, you'll see the pattern, and the pattern
won't change for that event. That's something that we're figuring out whether we
want to keep that same or not. Because we can randomize it very easily. So every time
a kid races it'll be different. (Question) Well I was thinking if it
weren't consistent, you wouldn't really know if you're getting better or worse and that
effects changing have. Because you wouldn't know if it's timing
or dumb luck. So I think it's good that it's consistent. (Bart) Yeah, and kids are
hyper-competitive these days. So with the same thing, we felt that if you threw them
different environments in the same event, it's not really that fair. Because
one kid might not have the same available energy sources during
that race versus another student. So we're trying to make it as fair as possible
per event. (Brett) And the other thing we talked about is this
an opportunity for students to actually collaborate with each other if it's
the same for everyone. You know two students might play, one might do really well
and the other might do really poorly. The one that did poorly might
this is an opportunity for them to look at the one that did well, and what did you do? And they talk about
well I switched to wind energy here, because the wind was really going. Oh, okay!
And then they started thinking about the wind stuff and it's an opportunity for Peter to engage
then in the class situation and start talking about, you know, there's
different areas of the country that the wind
[ inaudible ]. We were talking about that yesterday. I never knew that. So there's interesting
opportunities to engage the students after the game, but it's relevant
to them because they just went through it and it's not just wind energy
oh, okay, I'm doing something. (Bart) And we've
thrown, this is version one, we have ideas enough for probably five
versions of this game that will pull in real data from Acuweather
to run tracks. There's all sorts of ideas here and it's just a matter
of implementing them. And we're just gonna go with the basic one first to see how it works
with Peter's students. How it works with other students and people are playing it and then go from there based on interest
to see how much we want to rev this game up.
Any other questions or anything?
Well thanks everybody for coming. If you want to take a look at this game, by all means,
email one of us. We can get you the website and get you into test it and things like that.
Because we're at the point now where we're gonna start to look feedback and try to sort out all the bugs before we put
it out there. Thanks a lot! {applause}