Welcome to your Saturday afternoon nap.

This week: The 'design' of game design.

How do you design a game?

After you have an idea and before you program it, this is the design.

Taking the idea, pushing it, pulling it, testing it, improving it; this phase is crucial and oft-overlooked by beginning designers.

The ability to develop a model to test out the parameters of the game is faster and infinitely cheaper than actually programming the game and then having to make major changes. And then program it again…and again…

But what to do instead?

In the old days (before last Wednesday), I spent a lot of time with paper and pencil.

Last Wednesday, learning about the power of modeling using system dynamics tools profoundly changed the way I will personally design, and the way I will teach design.

I’m talking about the modeling tool: STELLA.

About 4 years ago, I wrote a game that could best be described as a cross between Tetris and Scrabble. Blocks with letters in them are added to a playing area, and the player is responsible for deleting and rearranging them so that words from a list were formed. When a word is formed, the letters that made up that word were removed from the play area. Note: that the game has serious design issues, and I am working on fixing them as we speak.

Ultimately it will be an educational game. All the words are from the spelling bee word list and includes a lot of synonyms, antonyms, etc. And eventually will include, when a word is completed, a pop-up requiring selecting the proper definition of the word in order to remove it from the list.

Blocks are added at a specified rate, and the rate is sped up as the player makes moves, so that making lots of bad moves ends up being counter-productive. Forcing the player to quickly make the best moves possible.

The amount of time I spent trying to find the right mixture of rates would have been much easier with STELLA.

Please check out the first draft version of the game. Note that this was made before I studied graphic design, so I apologize if looking at it causes you to have seizures. Due to a computer crash, I also lost the instructions and support file, and since I am making version 2, I will not be replacing them. So, basically, jump in and try and figure it out if you want to play it.

Alphabricks


And check out the instructional video on how I will be designing the flow of pieces in version 2.

STELLA Game Design Instructional Video

Structured computer conferences in 2d animation

Today’s posting is about the web tool ‘structured computer conferences’ aka discussion boards.

I have been teaching at the community college level for a few years now, and in my introduction to animation class, I always feel we spend so much time on the technical aspects of the tools we use, that we end up not discussing the concepts and theories of animation that are required to be able to use the tool well.

When I do talk about them, I end up going through them quickly, and the students just sit there trying to memorize what I have said, like they might math flash cards.

From the book Meaningful Learning with Technology (Jonassen, et. al.) state that “In order for students to learn meaningfully, they must be willfully engaged in a meaningful task” (p. 1)

and further indicate 5 factors that make learning meaningful:

“Active…When learning about things in natural contexts, humans interact with their environment and manipulate the objects in that environment, observing the effects of the interventions and constructing their own interpretations of the phenomena and the results of their manipulations.” (p.2-3)

“Constructive…New experiences often provide a discrepancy between what learners observe and what they understand…that is when meaningful learning begins.”(p.3)

“Intentional…everything that we do is intended to fulfill some goal…technologies have often been used to support te3acher’s goals, but not those of learners.” (p.4)

“Authentic…most lessons learned in schools focus on general principles or theories…however teachers and professors remove those ideas from their natural contexts in order to be able to cover the curriculum more efficiently.” (p. 4)

“Cooperative…humans naturally work together in learning and knowledge-building communities.” (p.4)

So, how do I get my students to learn about animation techniques when they have not yet completely learned how to animate? The answer is quite simple, actually. I have them go through the design process of creating an animation, focusing on the non-technical aspects, such as storyboarding and art direction.

Our classrooms are so chaotic, with no real place to do this collaborative work, basically each student has a little semi-cubicle. So, I started thinking about how I could make use of our Blackboard online learning system to help out. And I started thinking about how
I could use the discussion boards built into blackboard for this purpose.


From his book “Modeling with technology: Mindtools for conceptual change” (2006), David H. Jonassen talking about discussion boards (called structured computer conferences), states that “the most effective computer conferences are those with a specific purpose, such as solving a problem.” (p. 195)
Jonassen also states that ”role-playing is more effective than debates for engaging higher-level argumentative discussion.” (p. 197)

These two pieces of information give me what I need to try out a new classroom strategy. This semester, I am having my students engage in a structured computer conference where they are to create an animation project from inception to ready-for-aniamtion.

They are completely responsible for all aspects of the project, including assigning real-life roles and performing those roles as they go through all of the pre-production steps necessary to create an animation.

This project will be due right in time for us to start our final animations (what a coincidence, huh?)

I am still trying to figure out a way to have the animation lessons we do along the way tie into this as well, so that the entire semester gets rolled up into this exercise. But for now, I am going to see how it goes.

So, check out the video and I apologize for the audio. My allergies are unbelievable right now and the dust storm today makes it so i can hardly breathe, let alone talk.

Animation Team Exercise Discussions Video

wish us luck. And take a nap, it’s good for you.

My Google Earth Tour Video

Greetings earthlings, and welcome to another Saturday afternoon nap. On todays agenda is discussing Google Earth.

First of all, here is a link to the video.

Google Earth Tour

I tried Youtube, but they compressed it and totally screwed up the synchronization of audio and video.

I really like this tool, and wish I had more time to play with it. I think the self-directed nature of exploring and finding out what's where just using our curious nature makes this an amazing tool. I had to try about 10 times to make this video. First of all, I kept making 15 minute videos because I wantyed to show you guys everything. Finally, I got my spiel down to about 4:30 and my computer decided it was tired and wouldn't perfom so good.

My personal favorite aspect of google earth is the information links. I especially like the links directly to Wikipedia (one of my all-time favorite sites). The searching for anything anywhere and having it pop up little balloons and zooming you in so you can see them is just amazing.

Well, I need to go back and explore the surface of the moon some more (or maybe take another nap)

Wake me up when it's over

Spring 2010 - One semester left to graduation (assuming I pass the test).

Big brain burnout has left me in need of a regularly scheduled nap time. I'll come back and update you about how well I slept once I wake up.!!