Failing to learn

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The analog mission

If I measure the success of the analog mission in terms of meeting my expectations, then it was a failure. A right-royal failure. But, this is the life of a games designer. You have to learn to live with your mistakes. You have to learn to dance in the rain. You need to harden up. I’m talking about being a games designer in the context of education. I’m not professing to be any kind of expert. I’m a newbie, but already I’m learning a few things, and that was the purpose of the analog mission.

So, what is an analog mission? I have stolen the term from NASA. Because you want to learn from your mistakes before you go into space, rather than while in space, NASA runs complex missions underwater and in the desert. These analog missions are designed to test people and equipment in harsh conditions akin to the extremes of heat, cold, and isolation that will be experienced on real missions in space.

My analog mission was a puzzle game that used digital technology for communications, but not to define or enhance the game. I chose Twitter as the communications channel, but the game itself was old school and real world. A wooden puzzle called the Locked Cross was disassembled, and each piece was packed into a luscious and mysterious blue purse with a gold cord for hanging it around a players neck. Then the purses were hidden around the venue which served as the game environment. A player who had followed the clues via a Twitter hashtag would know another player by their unusual and similar attire. The queen (the senior female present) held the key (a clue to be found in Robert Bly’s title Iron John mysteriously left lying around for players to find). This game was designed to test the concept for a fully blown augmented and alternate reality game called Fragmented, where the wooden puzzle pieces will be replaced with fragments of a narrative embedded (electronically) in a real-world learning environment. Up to now, everything was going to plan.

Then a bombshell dropped — no-one was tweeting.

 

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Anatomy of an ARG

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Stephen at lighthouse

I haven't been to the lighthouse for years. There's no road to it; you have to walk. You drive the car to a spot the locals call Jack's Point. It's named after Bloody Jack, a hard man who, by his name, you might think was a fierce warlord. Turns out he got his nickname from his colourful language. His real name he gave to the headland half a mile to the south, Tuhawaiki Point. It's marked with a white octagonal light tower. On my right is a rolling paddock of wheat, on my left a sharp drop to the shingle beach fifty feet below. The dog is in a state of high excitement, new scents abound. I am having a ball, and I wouldn't be here if I wasn't playing Ingress.

So if your opinion is that computer games promote a disconnect from the planet, obesity, and a taste for violence, then you may have to rethink it; if only by acknowledging that there are games you can play on your feet, in the open air, in loosely knit teams of like-minded, peace-loving people your own age. These games go by many names: alternate reality game, augmented reality game, urban gaming, location-enabled game, pervasive game, street game, and probably more. I'll use just the one term in this article: alternate reality game (ARG). Imagine a world in which things are slightly different. Allow yourself to buy into that idea, and temporarily re-invent yourself. In your real life you'll be whoever you are, but in this other world you are effective, pro-active, insightful, and above all resilient. Put that other life on hold. See if this new effective self transforms your old self. Maybe even transcends your old self. That's why ARGs come under the broad mantle of reality hacks.

Typically these games are played on mobile devices, most likely your phone. They are "multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments" [Wikipedia], but I'd say that there is plenty of evidence and rationale for Ingress to push out into the wider landscape, and even to really remote locations. Ingress is a game from Niantic Labs, a startup within Google led by John Hanke, the man who, with others, invented Google Earth. You think it's a game, but it's not a game, the authors say. Every time you long tap an empty space on the Ingress map and choose New Portal, you are sending Google a little tiny piece of their stock in trade. That's not a bad thing, nor is it a conspiracy theory; it's just crowd-sourcing.

Exotic Matter (XM) is entering the world through portals. These portals are statues, monuments, porticos, churches, football stadiums, murals; any object of interest openly available to the public. The players are divided into factions: the Enlightened, and the Resistance. I chose to play on the side of the Resistance, because I don't want the world filled up with this Exotic Matter, whatever it is. I like the old world, the way it was before. You can defend a portal of your own, and you can attack a portal of the other faction and try to take it over. You must physically approach a portal to play it, you have to move in the real world to engage. The gameplay is deliciously complex, rich in rewards, inventory and powers. It's played out on Levels 1 to 8 and beyond. I heard of a Level 15 player the other day, a demi-god. There are frequent bulletins, videos posted on YouTube called the Ingress Report, and Ingress News. There are communities, both official and unofficial. There are around 7 million players worldwide.

So, why am I doing this? For the good of my health? At one level, yes. I need the exercise. But at another level, I am trying to understand the anatomy of an ARG. There's a whole new pedagogy here. It's constructionist, connectivist, and game-based. I have a strong feeling that students and their teachers should be doing this in some way. Designing, building and playing alternate reality games folded around curriculum. Just how I don't pretend to know yet. I'm looking for that now. That's why I'm at the lighthouse with my dog.

I’m keen to hear from any educator who is following a similar pathway, and may have experience of alternate reality or augmented reality games used in an educational context. I’d like to join any existing community, else I’ll start one and we can begin sharing!

***

Just as Niantic Labs is a start-up within Google, so is Stephen's project a start-up within CORE Education. Towards the end of last year CORE established their internal incubator. ARG-EF, The Alternate Reality Games in Education Framework, is one of the projects supported by the CORE Incubator, and is scheduled to deliver its first demonstration game in June of this year.

LINKS

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Unpacking 3D in Chromebook

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I don't know about you, but I've always found it hard to get my head around stuff like

F(x,y)=x*y^3-y*x^3

As a boy, I'd chew my pencil and stare out of the window and wish I was playing with my kite or riding my bicycle. With dreams of being a navigator I would need not just to pass maths, I'd need an A.

Easty (we called him that because his brain had gone west) failed to capture my imagination. The chalk squeaked on the blackboard, and some days tears would well up as I tried to get to grips with it all. Mr Kirkwood's class was a slight improvement, we plotted parabolas on graph paper. We weren't sure what parabolas were for, but at least there was a physical manifestation, a drawing on a piece of paper. Not until I was 17, and attending sea school, did it all start to make some sense, because now there was a globe, and angles subtended at the centre of the earth, and arcs described on the surface of the earth. Arcs along which you could steam a ship.

But now, in second childhood, I am happy playing on my Chromebook. I have just grabbed 3D Function Graphics from the Chrome Web Store. It's free, so I didn't even need to think about it. Click. Done. It's obvious how it works. All I need now are some cool 3D functions (if I was at school my maths teacher would be writing them on the board). In another tab I go to Google and put in the obvious search string "cool 3d functions" and I land on the Physics Forum page 'Cool 3-D functions for graphing' by LPHY.

I try a few – you just enter the function in a text box at the top of the page – and the one I like the best is

F(x,y)=cos(abs(x)+abs(y))

It makes an object that looks like this

3D Function Graphics - 1

I wonder… what would it look like if I … put this?
 
F(x,y)=cos(abs(x*1.4)+abs(y*1.4))

Wow, look what's happened to the corners!

3D Function Graphics - 2

Now, I didn't tell you that another thing I've found in the Chrome Web Store is Pixlr Editor. I'm wondering if I could turn my object into a character. There's an 'export as image' feature in 3D Function Graphics, so it's easy to get these 2D snapshots of my object (viewed from any angle) Pixlr Editor. I try a few filters, and then hit on this one… that's one mean duck. Quack! Quack!

3D Function Graphics 3

Since discovering 3D Function Graphics I'm taking a lot more interest in functions. All this fun has put me in mind of Ed Catmull, the brains behind many of the algorithms that powered Pixar and gave us Toy Story, and Finding Nemo, and Cars. It seems that all those numbers can be an enormous amount of fun. Serious fun. Hard fun.

I think what I'm trying to say is this: When you see a student idly playing around in their Chromebook, fiddling about with something, don't be in too much of a hurry to pull them back on task. They may be learning something very important and personal to them.

Number 6 of CORE Education's 10 Trends 2013 was 'Thinking 3D'. I think you can unpack that in many ways.

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HP Chromebook review

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HP Chromebook

I'm an early adopter. I'm a dedicated follower of fashion. As a result, I have a number of netbooks and tablets serving as bookends; batteries flat, lock-screen password forgotten—should open a museum. So, having recently attended the GAFE Summit in Christchurch, I thought I should acquire a Chromebook. The GAFE team had hyped Chromebooks to the max, but actually trying to get hold of one was not easy. I signed up for a pre-loved one from Cyclone, who were exhibiting at the summit. My preference would have been for a Samsung; I am something of a Samsung fan. I have a Samsung TV, several models of Galaxy phone, and, if they made kitchen appliances, I'd buy those too. None of the many retailers I spoke to, however, could supply one. In fact, they couldn't supply any flavour of Chromebook, and several professed that they had never to have heard of them. Odd for a device that is (supposedly) taking the education scene by storm. Nevertheless, on June 2 Google Chrome blog announced that Chromebooks are coming to New Zealand soon.* I drove home via Cyclone, and collected my Peach coloured pre-loved HP Chromebook.

First impressions out of the box

Chromebook and Apple Air comparison

After tea I opened the box. If it was pre-loved, I would not have known, the packaging was all in tact and it looked and felt like new. I had paid an ex-demonstrator price, so I was well pleased. The first things I noticed were the colour and the texture, it was pink and rubbery like a hot water bottle; I warmed to it immediately. The next thing I noticed was the weight. I put it on the kitchen scales and the needle went around to a massive 1.9 kgs—compared with my Apple Air at 1.3 kgs. Back in the 1990s we tossed an HP optical drive into Loch Ness (to the dismay of the HP representative, who thought he had arrived to receive praise)—we were that annoyed by it. If later I want to send this Chromebook into Low Earth Orbit, it will cost me around US$5000. Battery life comes at a price. But what battery life! With default power saver settings HP Chromebook outruns Apple Air by 4 hours.

 

Pros and cons: pleasantly surprised

CORE's IT guru, Glen Davies, warned me I may feel claustrophobic in the Chromebook. With minimal on-board storage, with Chrome the only browser (because the browser is the operating system), and with all the activity channelled through Google, that was a possibility. But you know? I think I feel liberated. I feel less ownership of the device, in fact, I'd be happy to share it, because my stuff is not in the device, it's in my login. Once I re-train myself to think like this, I can go to any cybercafé login, and be at home.

To expand on this idea, and take it into the secondary or tertiary learning environment, it's a lot more robust. No longer is "a crash ate my homework" a valid excuse. A Chromebook that goes bouncing down two floors of concrete stairs can be replaced with a loan machine for the very next class.

And they're cheap. The original target of the One Laptop per Child project was US$100 per unit, but that was maybe never that realistic; better to say US$500, and get a few features that even the undeveloped world might expect … like good battery life, a robust keyboard, a smart lid, virus immunity, and hundreds of great apps.

Worth trying out

So, my suggestion is that if it's not too late, if the Powers That Be have not already decided otherwise, get hold of a Chromebook and pass it around your teachers, tutors, or trainers, and some of your user group, and solicit feedback. You'll be pleasantly surprised. I'd say the big advantage of a Chromebook over a tablet is the keyboard, and the big disadvantage is the weight. Try it for yourself!

Links:

Google Chromebooks

Google Chrome Blog 

Cyclone Computers

One Laptop per Child project timeline

Share your views:

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts about the Chromebook so others may benefit.

* Looks like they’re on their way: Stuff news

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Low budget explorations in Virtual Reality

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Stereoscopy old and new pic Stephen Lowe

It is nearly a quarter century since Neal Stephenson wrote Snow Crash, and exactly thirty years since William Gibson gave us Neuromancer. These two cyberpunk novels, along with the films Blade Runner and The Matrix, triggered the consensual dream that reality would merge seamlessly with a computer generated virtual reality in which our avatars had superhuman powers. Riding this wave, many educators were drawn to Second Life. But Second Life is resource-hungry, and it kind of coincided with the move away from desktops towards laptops. So, firewalls, capped data accounts, slow networks, inadequate processing power, and smaller screens caused interest to wane. While games and virtual worlds engage us deeply, our experience is still constrained to a flat screen; true immersion continues to elude us.

But there is a change coming, and it is being brought about by faster processing, better screen resolutions, cheaper hardware, and the sheer genius of a generation of young entrepreneurs.

Key to this change is the re-discovery of a 100-year-old technology — stereoscopy. The device we all know and love is the View-Master. The red binocular viewer with the lever on the side for advancing the circular disc never ceases to give pleasure. I dug out ours, and looked through Muppet Treasure Island, and Thunderbirds. The View-Master is a useful object to think with, but all it delivers is a still image with an illusion of depth. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t go far enough.

I searched around and found the FOV2GO system from University of Southern California, also the Hasbro MY3D system. Both slot an iPhone into a binocular viewer. I acquired the Hasbro MY3D viewer because it was easily available on Fishpond at a cost of just $25. When I couldn’t find the advertised apps for the Hasbro I tried the Tales from the Minus Lab app from USC. The result is a powerful illusion of moving around inside a 3D world. I have to say that the first few minutes caused me to go, “Wow!” and, “This is incredible!” Then I started to feel a little motion sick, which is common in virtual reality environments.

I’m into pretotyping (pretotyping refers to the art and science of faking it then making it), in the way taught by Alberto Savoia. While I do my discovery, my early thinking, I’m going to pretend I’ve got the real deal. Then I can make mistakes and take wrong turns quickly and cheaply until I have found my way. Once I have a design that can be expressed as a clear brief, and raised enough money to partner with a games designer, then I’ll acquire the $300 developer kit for Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift. It’s reported in this month’s IEEE Spectrum magazine that the U.S. Navy just bought one, so it’s considered to be serious kit. I know what I’m looking for: a compelling virtual world in which students — instead of reading a text book, or perhaps in conjunction with reading a textbook — can run simulations of learning episodes. In these spaces they can change the parameters and learn by going, “What if?”

Ten years from now I’m sure such things will be commonplace; teachers will work with learning technicians to create authentic scenarios, and the $100 headsets will just be lying around in the modern learning environments the students inhabit. No-one will give it a second thought, but right now it’s still one of the challenging frontiers of ed-tech. And the challenge I'm putting forward here is not to seek funding for some behemoth project that will take a year and either succeed or more probably fail in some spectacular way, but to spend a little time seeing what Alberto Savoia has to say about pretotyping, and kicking off with some light, agile, low-stakes thing. And then sneak it up on your students and just see what they make of it. This is a community of practice, and we love to share. Please tell us about your experiments and how they go.

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