Bye bye blogger

This is my last post from blogger, as I have moved house to typepad. See http://judyrobertson.typepad.com for future posts.

Teachers on Neverwinter Nights

For videos with teachers talking about the value of Neverwinter Nights games making with their classes and demoing games they have made (see Star Pupils post), see: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ictineducation/gamesbasedlearning/sharingpractice/gamesdesign/neverwinternights.asp

Scottish Learning Festival : Tall tales about mind and brain

In order to prove that my brain is still young, I have decided to blog this session at the Scottish Learning Festival as it happens. I have seen people do throughout the conference (and also put photos on flickr as they are taken). I am not entirely convinced it's the best way to listen to a speaker, but we shall see. I have been interested in this topic: "tales of mind and brain" (also a book by Sergio Della Sala) for a while. It's by an Edinburgh University neuroscience academic. Apparently 90% of teachers think knowledge of the brain is important to education. The speaker (oddly) disagrees and promises to debunk neuromyths. I love the idea that there is such a thing as neuromyths! It is over simplified and over interpreted findings from neuroscience research. I betcha the "left brain/ right brain" thing is a neuromyth. It turns out that people are more likely to agree with sentences about education if they have added mumbo neuroscience jargon inserted rather than if they are presented in everyday language. This reminds me a bit of pseudo science claims as might be discussed in the Skeptic's Guide to the universe: jargon fogs claims and makes them seem more serious than they are. The speaker mentions that we don't need anecdotes - we need numbers. I have also heard "the plural of anecdote is not data" which is neat expression of the same point. The audience seems to be enjoying this greatly, laughing more than is decent in a late afternoon academic talk. But I have to say, he is very good. In fact, he just made a crowd of otherwise sober teachers shout "bananna" and wave their arms at him. And subsequently throw rolled up paper at him. It's all in the pursuit of illustrating left and right eye dominance. He also shows the famous gorilla video where the audience's attention is misdirected by a counting task so they don't notice a gorilla prancing on screen. Oh, this goes down very well this those old teachers, I can tell you.

• Myth: there is iron in spinach and it makes you strong. This came from a typo (decimal point error) in a scientific paper 130 years ago.
• Myth: We only use 15% of the brain. There is actually not spare capacity.
• Myth: playing Mozart to babies in the womb makes them more intelligent. There was an inconclusive small study which found a tiny effect which got magnified in the media.
• Myth: There are left and right hemispheres: one creative, the other logical. Hah! I knew we would get there. So don't bother trying to breathe through your left nostril to stimulate the creativity of your right brain. It won't work. Right-brain techniques for drawing or writing are based on an over simplification over split brain. There are some differences between left and right hemisphere but they are more symmetrical than you might have been led to believe. Right hemisphere enables us to direct attention (lesions here lead to neglect to things on the left part of the visual field) but doesn't have mysterious magical powers of creativity.
• Myth: your mind remembers everything which happened to you; memories are held in a filing system. Your brain reconstructs events according to belief systems or plausible associations. The mind is not a video camera.
• Myth: the full moon influences human behaviour. Policemen, nurses and teachers believe this but it ain't true.

The talk concludes on this lunar note. My opinion: entertaining, informative but not very much depth. I guess the take home message is for people to be more skeptical about neuroscience claims in education, but it would have been good to see specific claims debunked in more depth. Mind you, he freely admits that he doesn't have anything to contribute to educationalists - neuroscientists can learn from practicing teachers.

Questions: a teacher asks about brain gym. The speaker has found no evidence to support it (compares it to acupunture), comes from mis-interpretation of the literature. Another teacher asks whether dyslexics are right brained. The speaker answers that there are many forms of dyslexia, and there is no particular link with the right hemisphere. Another teacher asks about thinking positive thoughts to make positive neural pathways, and that people should drink more water as the brain is 70% water. The speaker expresses his incredulity that people can believe the more bizarre claims. Sure, kids should drink more water he says but how much depends on how many toilets the school has. Hehe.

Learner Generated Contexts

While I remember: I was at an event at the London Knowledge Lab last week about Learner Generated Contexts, which was organised by my wee academic pal Rose Luckin. What, you might wonder, is a learner generated context? I have often wondered myself. Learner generated content I get - it's about students learning through creating materials, whether it be writing on a blog or contributing to a wiki, or recording a podcast. But what does context mean here? I think it means that learners not only get to make stuff, but to choose how they want to learn too. The context could be where they want to learn (home, school) or the medium they want to learn with (book, video, online articles), or the topics they want to learn in depth. Context seems to be a placeholder for a whole lot at the moment, and the LGC group are working on defining a framework to make this clearer. A question raised after the event was related to issues I am familiar with from learner centred software design. How can learners know the best way to learn? I mean, by definition, they don't know the topic. Teachers do, and they have experience in effective ways of teaching it. Wouldn't my students who have paid a fortune to study on our MSc programmes be miffed if I told them to work out how to teach themselves? (Almost certainly yes). This is an extreme position of course, but points to a real concern. How can teachers switch from being content providers to helping learners to be providers of their own contexts? Luckily, I don't have to answer that, as Rose and co. will. All this jargon makes my head spin.

Scottish Learning Festival

It is, of course, to my great shame and disgrace that I return to blogging after a long summer gap. Contrary to popular belief, academics actually do work over the summer (we don't get the same holidays as the students) but I have been busy with other things. One of those other things was running Gamemakers workshops for kids, as I normally do each summer. Maybe I will write about that in another post. Another project I have been busy with is writing a book on narrative, technology and learning (with 5 colleagues). It's loads of fun. Oh yes, and the small matter of rewriting ever module in the department for semesterisation and structuring a brand new degree. Anyway, I come back to my blog, contrite and full of new inspiration after hearing Euan McIntosh speak at the Scottish Learning Festival. Euan is a regular educational blogger with an audience of 300000. He started with an audience of 2 (him and his mum. Why does my mum not read my blog? Why, mum?). He is an excellent speaker. On this occasion he was talking about adopting social media in education. He gave the examples of blogging in East Lothian (teachers, pupils and educational directors) and podcasting for language classes in Aberdeenshire. His main point was about audience: giving the kids a real world authentic audience rather than the audience of just their teacher, or peers. I buy most of these arguments, and have made them myself. Yes, students should have real audiences. Of course we should open up what we're doing in class to share with the outside world (when we have something to share). But shouldn't we be talking about potential audience here? What intrigues me is this: how many people write blogs and get no audience whatever (apart from me)? A a learner, if you 're so busy writing your own blog, how do you find time to read other people's? If there are 100 students in my class, they can't all read each others' blogs every day. And if you have 800,000 comments on a post, how can you usefully summarise the feedback in order to learn from it? Let's be clear: I think there is a lot of potential for blogging and other Web 2.0 apps in education. But I do think we need to evolve new approaches for dealing with the problems which will arise. We also need some careful study of the interaction patterns which take place: how many readers for every writer? How many commenters for every reader? How many readers revise according to comments? Hah, there's probably an MSc dissertation in there at least. I will be experimenting with this new fangled social networking business this term with my Human Factors module. I have created a social network for the students on Ning and they will be contributing their own work for other students to view and listen to. After Christmas I'm going to teach my multimedia module in Second Life. I predict I will be wailing and gnashing my teeth by mid January, and that some of my students will wail and gnash theirs about Ning. But hey - as far as I can see university teaching always involves some wailing and gnashing, so why not give it a go?

Google Zeitgeist Europe: Digital Youth

Digital Youth that I am, I was recently asked to speak at Google Zeitgeist Europe 2007 on the Digital Youth panel. Truth to tell, I felt rather old among the other speakers at the ripe old age of 30. You could see the audience were feeling old too. They had a "oh my, those young folks" sort of expression written all over their faces. Google Zeitgeist Europe is an invitation only conference to "thought leaders", mostly business people, where emerging trends and topics of interest are discussed, mostly by ridiculously rich and successful people (such as the CEOs of Google, Easyjet and Orange) . Not my usual crowd, then. I was surprised, though, that two of the panels were similar in theme to the Computer Assisted Learning conference in Dublin in March: the developing world and user generated content. Back to digital youth. The other panel members were Josh Spear, Michael and Zochi Birch (founders of Bebo) and Yat Siu, who the CEO of a games company which does Hello Kitty online games. Jonathan Zittrain did an excellent job of moderating the panel and occasionally gently winding up the panelists. A lot of the time when I give talks I will be trying to convince teachers or educators that living in a digital world isn't going to rot children's brains or corrupt their morals. On this particular occasion I felt myself getting middle aged very rapidly. I think I was channeling my mum at one point. Two of the talks on the panel painted a picture of what a digital youth is, and what sort of lifestyle such a person might lead. The resulting picture of them digital youths was not attractive to my eyes. Short attention span? Hard to impress? Materialistic? That strikes me as a little harsh on the young 'uns who seem to display the opposite characteristics when working on creative tasks. The teenagers who come to my Gamemaker workshops are as keen as being a teenager will allow them to be. They enter a flow state and concentrate incredibly hard for long periods (to the puzzlement of the organiser from the local authority who doesn't like computers, I suspect). In making storylines for their games, they do wrestle with moral issues to surprising degree (see http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~judy/papers/RobertsonGoodEdutainment06.pdf for example storylines). One particular example digital youth activity worried me a lot. It was about a dating web site where people can set up games for other people to get to know them with. The example was a girl who set up a game asking people to improve her. Great. Because teenagers need more social pressure about their appearance/habits/personality, don't they? This example also worried some parents in the audience, so I was glad I challenged it. This of course lead to some questions from the audience about whose responsibility it is to educate children/young people about internet safety and so on. It's everyone's responsibility to discuss these issues with children. If it takes a whole village to raise a child then it should take parents, teachers AND the whole community of internet companies to raise a digital youth.

Learner centred design: a grumpy view

A few weeks ago we started working with an Edinburgh school to get the help of pupils in designing the Adventure Author game making software. We have a design team of 6 11-12 year olds and 8 x 2 hour sessions. The idea is that by consulting kids about the design of software which they will use early on in the development process, you can reduce the risk of making software which kids don't want or can't use. Judith Good and I have written about the merits of learner centred design at length. It can work really well. I wrote this optimistic foreword to the IDC 2007 proceedings when all fired up after a really successful session with the design team:"The IDC community is lucky in several respects. As technology moves on at a rate which many adult users find alarming, our child users embrace it with confidence and pleasure. In fact, when involved in a design team in an appropriate way, they can offer insightful advice on how to harness technological developments in new applications. As many of us have discovered, design sessions with children are never dull; part of the pleasure of working with this approach is that we are often genuinely surprised – and delighted- by their contributions. When given the opportunity to be involved in the design and evaluation of the technology they use in their every day lives, children have a lot to say which is worth hearing." BUT... and you knew there had to be a "but"... there are limits to what you can hope to achieve with this method. In a more recent session, I was reminded of this as a splash of icy water in my face. It's mostly because what we are trying to do is very complex. We want the kids to help us with a redesign of software which enables kids to make games for other children to play games. But to do this, the child designers need to be able to use the existing software which we are adapting. This software takes a long time to learn, so we have spent around 6 hours letting them explore this software before we could even start on design work. That's a large investment of time, but they wouldn't be in a position to help until they were experienced enough. The school have been very generous in allowing us to work with a small group for so many sessions; this is not easy to arrange. We have found that the children are easily able to spot interface flaws and explain what the problem is. They are quite sophisticated in this respect, much more so than their teachers might predict. They are not so good at suggesting plausible solutions, and they certainly need more practice in designing new interfaces. Of course they do - adult interface designers have trained for years to learn these skills! Why should we expect kids to do better simply by virtue of being kids? But I tell you what - if Bioware had spent event 2 hours with these kids before releasing the NWN toolset, it would be a better bit of software today!

Star pupils

This is where I make up for swiping at policy makers (sorry Becta) and take my proverbial hat off to Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS). In the first week of May Cathrin and I lead a Neverwinter Nights game authoring workshop for teachers organised by the excellent Derek Robertson of LTS. It was part of a year pilot program to trial game making software in Scottish classrooms. Teachers from 8 local authorities had the opportunity to spend 2.5 days learning how to use a game authoring package (Thinking Worlds, Mission Maker, Gamemaker or Neverwinter Nights). Their mission was then to return to their classes and let the kids loose with it. Presumably Derek has a master plan of how to gather research data documenting how they get on. Cathrin and I were very impressed by our group of teachers, who were from Dundee and Fife. We had a teacher who works with children with special behavioural needs, an English teacher, a p6 teacher, a computing teacher and a member of staff from LTS. They were all star pupils - enthusiastic, committed, perceptive! Curiously, the men seemed to have an interest in domestic concerns in their games. One game featured a crotched suit of armour and another was all about getting the ingredients to make a cake. Aw.. bless! As far as I know all the teachers have already started using the software with their classes so I am keen to find out how they get on. Being star pupils, they have already posted to the LTS blog about it: http://ltsblogs.org.uk/gamesdesign/2007/05/15/feedback-on-games-design-event/

BECTA Enhancing Learning Seminar

While we're on the subject of interesting-events-I-went-to-and-didn't-blog-at-the-time, I did a seminar at a BECTA event on Enhancing learning: virtual worlds, simulations and games based learning (April 24th) recently. I really enjoyed a talk by Dave Taylor, National Physical Laboratory who spoke about science teaching in Second Life. He's connected to the Schome (as in not school, not home, but schome) project. He had been working with children who joined a science club in second life and conducted various experiments there. It reminded me of some of the early papers on VR for science learning, expect that it is not a wacky lab idea: children are learning science in virtual worlds today. As we speak, probably. Alright, now I'm going to be an finicky academic. Dave Hassell, whos is director of educational content at Becta has a nice slide which says: "Evidence that pupils do learn and the main issue is not if pupils learn but what and how they learn." (see http://becta.org.uk/enhancinglearningseminar/DaveHassell-Becta.ppt#280,14,To be explored further). If you happen to have read Becta's recent landscape review document (http://publications.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=28221&page=1835) which was published in January this year, you may find this statement surprising. The review rather more cautiously comments that “…while much has been written about the potential of games as learning tools, the evidence is as yet limited” (Condie and Munro, 2007; 51). So I want to know: have Becta got some new unpublished research which they did between January and April this year which is bursting full of evidence for game based learning? I have written about the potential of game based learning myself from time to time :-) but I do try to provide evidence for my claims based on field studies. Fair enough if Becta are trying to encourage educators to get engaged with game based learning, but they could construct a reasoned argument to support their case.

E-Live conference

I will admit I find it hard to find time to blog interesting things which happen to me at work, but Ewan McIntosh, who works for Learning Teaching Scotland, has found the answer. He blogs while he attends conferences. He went to a seminar Cathrin and I gave at Edinburgh City Council's eLive! event and blogged it as we spoke: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/05/game_making_for.html.

Alice and the Sims

Now here's something I didn't know (but maybe you are less out of date than me!). The free 3D java based programming environment called Alice (made at Carnegie Mellon) has a deal with EA to include character libraries from the Sims. http://www.alice.org/simsannounce.html This has great potential for teaching programming concepts to novice computer scientists. I went to talk at Computer Assisted Learning 07 recently, and there was a talk about teaching with Alice (minus the cool characters). As you'd expect, the students lapped it up. As it turned out, they then had trouble transferring to using more standard programming tools in the second year. We're restrucuting our curriculum on our computer science and Information Systems degrees, so we should consider using Alice plus Sims. I'm also thinking of using Second Life (linden script) after hearing a talk by Dave Taylor about using Second Life for physics teaching. I suspect it might be hard to convince my colleagues of these ideas. Computer scientists are oddly conservative considering they're meant to be innovators.

Interaction Design and Children 2007 Keynote

I'm papers co-chair for the Interaction Design and Children conference this year. It looks like a good programme (lots of tangibles and games stuff). As I have mentioned before, both the key note talks are lego related. We just got the abstract from Mitchel Resnick and I agree so wholeheartedly with it, I thought I would include it here. If you happen to be in Aalborg, Denmark on June 7th you should go along for sure. The idea of life long kindergarten would bring Yishay's idea of the lego curriculum (see comment on previous post) a step nearer! http://idc2007.cs.aau.dk/programme.html Mitchel Resnick (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Medialab) "Lifelong Kindergarten: Strategies and Technologies to Help Children Develop as Creative Thinkers Kindergarten is undergoing a dramatic change. For nearly 200 years, since the first kindergarten opened in 1837, kindergarten has been a time for telling stories, building castles, drawing pictures, and learning to share. But that is starting to change. Today, more and more kindergarten children are spending time filling out phonics worksheets and memorizing math flashcards. In short, kindergarten is becoming more like the rest of school. In my mind, exactly the opposite is needed: Instead of making kindergarten like the rest of school, we need to make the rest of school (indeed, the rest of life) more like kindergarten. In this presentation, I will discuss the “kindergarten approach to learning,” which I view as a spiraling cycle in which children imagine what they want to do, create projects based on their ideas, play with their creations, share their ideas and creations with others, reflect on their experiences – all of which leads them to imagine new ideas and new projects. I will argue that this approach to learning is ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century, helping learners develop the creative-thinking skills that are critical to success and satisfaction in today’s society. I will discuss strategies for designing new technologies that encourage and support kindergarten-style learning, building on the success of traditional kindergarten materials and activities, but extending to learners of all ages, helping them continue to develop as creative thinkers. I will draw on examples from my research group at the MIT Media Lab, focusing especially on our Cricket and Scratch technologies."

Making games is for everyone (Women in Games blog)

Here's a blog entry I was asked to write for the Women in Games 2007 conference: http://womeningames.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/making-games-is-for-everyone-judy-robertson/#more-34. A bit on the ranty side, but they did tell me to be opinionated...

Jargon of the week

Here are two pieces of jargon which I have taken a fancy to recently.

• Creative disobedience. (From Inga Paterson at Abertay) It's a term used to describe what architects do when they defy the conventions of architectural space. Does it mean disobedience by not staying within the creative "rules" for generating new architecture? Or might it mean that the architects are being disobedient in some way, but at least they are doing so creatively? I'm not sure. I bet schools are just brimming with creative disobedience in the latter sense, but we need plenty more of it in the first sense. we should encourage the little children to explore and break design rules, and generally be inquisitive about them.
• Ontological innovation. (From Yishay Mor and Niall Winters). Ontology is the study of existence, the study of what is, and how things in the world can be categorised. How very grand! Ontological innovation is about discovering new categories of things in the world, which might explain better how the world works. Of course, educational research- particularly design-based research - is about discovering frameworks which help us better understand how people learn. (That's what I do). Imagine the conversation at the proverbial cocktail party:

"What do you do, Judy?"

"I am an ontological innovater"

"My,my. That must be an interesting line of work. What do you do?"

"I play with lego all day".

And, dear reader, if you happen to be one of my students, I would like to assure you that this is mere fancy. I am, naturally, marking your assignments with great diligence and pleasure. Not playing with lego. No, indeed.

What would you ask Susan Greenfield?

Last week Baroness Greenfield came to give a seminar at Heriot-Watt Uni where I work. She is Chancellor here, so she had to come some time. (It occurrs to me, if I can' t be a Lego Professor, I might like to be a Baroness. She's a professor and a baroness, the clever lady). She talked eloquently on the neuroscience of consciousness (http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Lecture), tackling the big questions with both serious thought and panache. To follow up on that, you might want to consult her book: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Private-Brain-Penguin-Press-Science/dp/0141007206/ref=sr_1_1/202-5490480-7385425?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174337354&sr=8-1) But an aside of her's struck me as rather interesting. It was about a tutorial she took at Oxford on neuroscience for medicine. She had two undergraduate students who were learning about vision and hearing and she raised the fascinating question of why it feels very different to hear than it does to see, even though the input to the brain from these senses can be indistinguishable as brain events. These two students were getting individual attention from one of the world's foremost neuroscientists, who was discussing the mysteries of the conscious mind. So what do you think the students asked? What would you have asked? I am sorry to say that the students chose to ask "Is this on the syllabus for the exam?". Sadly, the answer was "no". Many teachers will be familiar with this situation. (See also the lecturer's parable of Jesus and his student disciples http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2006/07/29/ed_col_29_July.xml) Some students expect us to spit out little owl pellets of knowledge at them so they can shovel them up and spit them back at us at an exam . What is it that we do to students that makes them become exam monkeys?(Sorry for the unpleasant and mixed analogies!). How can change everyone's expectations so students can take pleasure in learning for the sheer interest of it? I wish I knew.

Lego MMO

How very cool. Lego are making a massively multiplayer online game. http://www.lego.com/mmog/ I like lego, and lego games. Lego Starwars (http://www.legostarwarsthevideogame.com/flash/index.cfm) featured in a first year exam I wrote once. What better accolade could a company have? :-) For those of you who fancy visiting Denmark in the summer, come to the Interaction Design and Children 2007 conference, where we have Mark William Hansen and Mitchel Resnick as key note speakers. The former is the CEO of Lego and the latter is a Lego Professor at MIT Medialab. When I grow up, I want to be a Lego professor too.

Monkeys and militant eggs: thinking about creativity at university

Next week is the Oscars ceremony for my Multimedia class. The students can nominate their friends' short films or games for an award and we'll screen all the nominations before giving a grand prize. The students have been creating films or games for their assessed portfolios so I thought it would be nice for them to see what other students have been working on. It's a mammoth class of 109 students (roughly half MSc and half 4th year undergrad) so it is hard to build a sense of community. Actually, it's hard to do anything with a class that big, but that is probably another story. We had peer review sessions last week so the students could get advice on how to improve their work before the hand-in date. I was really pleased with what they had done! Some highlights include:

• The MSc student who bought a monkey costume in order to make "Return of the Ninja Monkeys" with members of his kung fu club;
• The 4th year student who persauded his friends to be front and hind legs of a pantomime cow for his touching tale of a cow who goes to live in the big city;
• The MSc student who spent hours blue-tacking eggs into position to make an animation about a gang of eggs who make pancakes;
• The 4th year student who taught himself flash animation and created a new sheepy superhero: "The wooley wonder".
• The MSc student who had never played a computer game before she came here but who spent her weekends learning how to play the Sims in order to make a family story about a girl and her grandfather.

What do your students do in your classes, you might be wondering? What purpose is there to this frivolity? My purposes in teaching this module were many, beyond the most basic imperative of surviving the term without turning into a gibbering wreck. The module is named "Multimedia Design" and I chose to focus on the learning objectives related to creative design rather than the dull techy objectives. All of the examples above are cases where the student has been so committed to seeing his idea through that he has taught himself new skills and added a little bit of himself to the project.

The portfolio assignment asked the students to create either a 3 minute film trailer or a 5 minute demo level of a game. The main constraints were that it had to tell a story andbe suitable for 12 year olds. Beyond that they had a lot of choice: they could choose which technology and software to use, the theme, the storyline, techniques and so on. A lot of the students opted to use a technique called Machinima where you record a video file of interactions within a computer game and edit to to make a story. I got this idea from one of Keri Facer's talks where she was talking about the importance of learner voice and self expression. So it's all her fault!

The most important aim was to give the students a chance to be creative. Such opportunities are rather rare on a computer science or IT degree. In order to encourage students to be creative, I felt that I, as the teacher, needed to build the right sort of environment.

• The students needed to find the assignment personally meaningful and fun. You would be surprised how hard university students find it to believe that they can have fun with their assignments. I wanted them to relax and take their work less seriously, particularly the MSc students. The older students get, the more uptight about assessments they get. Doubtless this is because the stakes get higher when you have a family to support, or a job to hold down as well as being a student. Yet, such stress and striving and worry about whether they will pass the exam occupies so much of the students' attention that get distracted from real learning. It's hard to be creative when you're stressed so I wanted a task which was engaging and chosen by the students themselves.
• The students needed encouragement in independent learning. I wanted them to take responsibility for teaching themselves skills which they needed for their portfolio work as and when the need arose. Curiously the 4th years turned out to be much better at this than the MSc students, who often expected me to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it.
• The students needed to understand the flexibility and changeability of the creative process, and needed reassurance that it was Ok to change their ideas or try something new.

I've been getting feedback from students this week and I think I have mostly managed to foster this environment. I'm glad because it was horribly risky and it gve me a few grey hairs at the beginning of term. An important part of getting it to work was by changing the delivery method of teaching, by reducing lectures and having more personal contact in the form of tutorials. I take all 4 tutorials for the class, so each student has some chance to talk to me about their ideas. They also have lab sessions for techy skills, and set readings every week. The personal contact time in tutorials has allowed the students to negotiate with me about the assignment instructions ("Does a music video count?") and for me to make sure their early designs were on the right track. I'm not happy with this module yet, for a number of reasons, but at least this aspect has gone well. Teaching students how to tackle open ended creative projects in a safe environment is important and the students seem to have valued it. There are of course many remaining problems, not least of which how to structure useful tutorial sessions for students with such varied background, but I will think about that in another post. In the meantime I will look forward to seeing more wacky videos and games. I will be sure to notify you of the Osar winner next week as soon as I change out of my posh frock.

Computational thinking, or why it's good to be a computer scientist

Computer scientists are heroes. They perform valiant rescue missions without leaving their desks; they deploy the super power of computational thinking! Why the hyperbole, Judy? It's the co-incidence of two interesting items which caught my attention recently. One was an article about computational thinking by Jeannette Wing, who is head of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. The other was a news story about a search for the missing computer scientist Jim Gray. Wing's article is a manifesto which promotes the teaching of the sorts of analytical thinking used by us computer scientists to everyone, as part of a basic education. As in: reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and computational thinking. The general idea is that in learning how to solve computer science problems, we have developed a set of techniques for approaching problems which are useful in everyday life, and when applied outside traditional computer sciency problems. I was finding it hard to find examples of what this might actually mean, when my husband (also a computer scientist) told me about the search for Jim Gray. Jim Gray is an ACM award winning engineer who works at Microsoft. He went missing at sea on January 28th, and although the coastguard called after the search after 5 days, since then his friends and colleagues (in organisations including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and NASA) have been hunting for him in a massive digital search effort. A blog entry on All Things Distributed comments somewhat cryptically that "Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly." Once the satellite imagery was available, it was split into lots of tiny sections and placed on Amazon's Mechanical Turk web site, where thousands of volunteers each looked at individual tiny sections to spot anything unusual. Sections which were flagged by volunteers were then further analysed by experts. The Mech Turk page for the search says: "Mechanical Turk workers looked at more than 560,000 images from 3 satellites, covering nearly 3,500 square miles of ocean". Now there are many amazing things about this story, including how on earth the search effort managed to get the relevant satellite data, and the moving goodwill of all those people who joined in the search, but what interests me most is the strategy used to solve this problem. It's a "divide and conquer" approach: breaking a seemingly intractable problem into bite sized chunks which can be easily solved with simple methods. In this case, the simpe method involved good old fashioned human eye sight. To avoid the computational worry of false positives (seeing something when nothing is there) they had experts check the small number of suspected sightings afterards. I'm not sure whether they had checks and balances to make sure there were no false negatives (seeing nothing when there really is something) but I bet you they had some system for it. This is a rapid application of well known computer science techniques to a solving a tangible human problem; a use of just-in-time computational thinking to help other people. I hope it is successful.

A visit from Oz

Our research group had a visit from two Australian teachers (Gail and Kim) the other day. They were on a travel grant from their education authority to find out about best practice in game based learning in the UK. They got in touch with me because of my Adventure Author project, which you will hear more about if you follow this blog. Adventure Author is about enabling children to make their own computer games, so I was delighted to hear from the teachers about their experiences in using a game making tool called Gamemaker in the classroom. Gamemaker is a cool visual programming environment for making 2d style platform-y games. There is a very nice textbook called the Gamemaker's Apprentice for it, which is written by my friend Jake Habgood. You can make games where koala bears get lost in mazes - what more could you possibly want? Anyway, what was so interesting about this visit was the overlap between Gail and Kim's experiences and our experiences with Adventure Author. We spent 8 weeks in a Scottish primary school in the Autumn, working with 10 year old pupils and their teachers to make computer games. The kids used a tool called Neverwinter Nights to make their own games. NWN games are 3D role-play games and so are different in style to Gamemaker games. Yet, despite this, and the fact that the children are a globe away from each other, we realised the children were gaining the same sorts of educational benefits. We're still doing the analysis of the evidence that we collected, but here's a snap shot of the list so far:

• Literacy - story making and dialogue
• Collaboration and communication
• Hypothesis testing
• Reflection
• Audience awareness
• Independent learning

The project in Sydney extends our work in quite an important way, which is by giving the children a global audience for their work. They have a class blog (which I must get hold of) where they post their experiences of game design. Now they have an international following of fans who like to play their games (including children in Glasgow, Scotland, where I grew up). Gone are the days when pupils wrote essays on "What I did during the summer" just for their teacher! Blogs and wikis gives kids a genuine reason for writing: to share their lives with other people. I suppose what I mean is "gone should be the days..". I don't think we're there yet.