Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

The Educational Gaming Commons (EGC) Lab, located in Findlay 6A near East Halls, is now open!  In addition to being a general-purpose lab that anyone with a valid PSU ID Card can access, we are seeking faculty interested in using this space for teaching and learning.  Faculty have the ability to reserve the room, allowing students the opportunity to come into the space and leverage gaming hardware and software to support course work and research. 

The lab consists of a wide variety of software, a list that is constantly growing!  Some highlights:

PC Software - Games

• Warcraft 3
• World of Warcraft
• Black and White 2
• Fable: The Lost Chapters
• Civilization 3
• Age of Empires
• SimCitiy: Societies
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• Counter-Strike: Source
• Team Fortress 2
• Gary's Mod
• Portal
• Day of Defeat
• Fraps (video-capture software used in conjunction with games)

PC Software - Authoring environments

• Valve's Source Engine SDK
• Warcraft 3's map editor
• Microsoft's XNA Game Studio
• CMU's Alice
• MIT's Scratch

We also have an Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii, with games such as Rock Band, BioShock, Wii Sports, Assassin's Creed and more games arriving each week.

Please email gaming@psu.edu if you have ideas for using the lab or if you would like a tour.  If you require a game not listed here, let us know and we would be happy to obtain copies and get it running to support your course sections!

The week is coming to a close and the Machinima projects are starting to take shape.  Most students chose to use a Valve product as their game of choice (Counter Strike, L4D and Gary's Mod), but some teams also opted for World of Warcraft.

In terms of the lab, the software and hardware worked well.  Fraps was used to capture video, then most teams selected Windows Movie Maker (it's on the lab machines already) to edit and add post production effects.  One issue that did arise: Fraps saves the video files in .avi.  For some reason, when students took their videos via a USB drive to other campus labs, Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player did recognize the files.  I had hoped any PSU imaged PC would be able to read the files, but apparently a Fraps codec is required for Windows media player and movie maker to work with the raw files.  Not a big deal for this small class, but something to look into for the Fall semester.

We also had a chance to test out the video switching equipment and flat panels.  We have five flat panels in the room, and any PC, console or laptop can be displayed on any flat panel.  This worked earlier in the week, but started acting spotty the last two days.  Part of the problem might be the room temperature, but we were able to stabalize that yesterday. 

Back for some final testing today, including a look at how the consoles are configured for online access.

Two sections of IST 110 are using the EGC Lab this week, creating Machinima videos as part of a team assignment.  Teams are using Fraps in conjunction with vaious game software such as Fable, World of Warcraft, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike, Gary's Mod and more to shoot their video, then using video editing software to create the final product (a 2-4 minute video).

The space is working great so far.  You can see a collection of images from the first day of class using the lab in our Flickr space. Things were a bit crowded with nearly 30 people in the space at the same time, but the rest of the week is open lab time from 10am-5pm.  This is how we plan on structuring lab use over the semester: faculty members can reserve the lab for blocks of time so students can use the space for course-related assignments and activities.  If the lab is not reserved for course use, students are free to swipe in using their PSU IDs and play games on the PCs, Xbox 360 or PS3. 

I hope to share some of the final machinima videos in the future, but for now here is a short video highlighting the first day of lab use.  Enjoy!

We just finished a meeting with Mark Sciegaj, who teaches HPA 101: Introduction to Health Services Organization.  Mark approached us about using SimHealth in his course, as a capstone exercise allowing the students to put their knowledge to use in an applied setting.  What I found interesting is that SimHealth was released in 1994, intended to allow players to shape public health policy.  Mark mentioned today that a lot of the policy prompts from the game are STILL applicable, and the health care system portrayed in the game from 1994 is nearly identical to the system in place today. 

We are working with Mark to figure out the actual project for the students as well.  One idea we are pursuing is to use the Blogs@PSU platform with a specific tag for the course, where students would reflect and write about their decision-making process after gameplay sessions.  The custom tag would allow Mark to pull everything into a single page and allow the students to read and compare strategies.  This is shaping up to be an exciting project, even when using a game from 1994!

One mission of the EGC is to build community around educational games.  We recently had the opportunity to continue towards this goal by talking with the folks from Learnstorm, a company that is putting together a great platform to bring educators together around games utilizing several web 2.0 tools along the way.  They already have many Charter Schools on board on the West Coast and are putting together games that map to curricular objectives.  They also plan to release an SDK that will allow other game makers to submit games to their platform, similar to Apple's App Store.  We look forward to a continued dialogue and possible ways we can collaborate with Learnstorm as they grow by providing opportunities for PSU teachers and researchers to leverage their tools and technology.

A couple years ago we explored using CyberCIEGE, a network security game, in a course in the College of IST.  The game was still a bit raw, but it did show a great deal of promise.  Now that IST has a major in security and risk analysis, a few faculty are revisiting CyberCIEGE.  Dr. Aungst and his colleagues have downloaded the SDK and conceptualizing a project around CyberSIEGE for the fall.  We're looking forward to helping wrap instructional materials around this game as it appears to be gaining adoption in educational use.

The Learning Design Summer Camp is right around the corner and we are working on a small game that participants will be able to play throughout the 2-day event.  During a brainstorming session, we jokingly brought up "Buzzword Bingo".  Anyone remember that IBM commercial from a couple years back?

We're running with the idea, and have a series of Bingo cards in production that contain words and phrases that will likely be discussed at Camp.  Not only does this provide an interesting way to engage participants, it also gives participants a great takeaway: a game that can easily be customized and repurposed to fit in any class session and hopefully increase attention and participation.

Finally, the lab is nearly complete!  We're testing the software, which is shaping up to be a great list of games and gaming authoring environments.  Once we finalize the list, you'll see it here.

The EGC is in full swing this summer with several projects on the books and more opportunities on the horizon.  We have two engagement projects underway, one focusing on a game-based environment for Chemistry 101 and the second a game for introductory English courses on the correct uses of basic grammar.  In addition to working with great faculty, I'm very excited about the potential reach of these projects.  Both of these courses have huge enrollments each semester. 

Two other opportunities we are exploring include an alternate reality game with the Library.  We participated in the Library Open House last year, talking with many students about the possibilities of gaming at Penn State.  The ARG idea could be an interesting way for students to engage with all the resources the library has to offer leading up to the day of the Open House.

Finally, I just got done talking with Dr. Sciegaj, a faculty member teaching HPA 101, about using SimHealth in his course sometime this fall or spring.  Again, this is a great opportunity to assist a faculty member in implementing game-based learning activities in a course that could impact a LOT of students at our campus.

All this, AND our EGC lab in Findlay 6A should be ready for the public in the fall!

We're working hard to establish a collaborative relationship with Blizzard entertainment, creators of the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises.  Several faculty at Penn State are using World of Warcraft in both classroom instruction and research settings.  IST's Gaming for Girls program has taken advantage of the Warcraft 3 editor in the past.  We are working on an agreement with Blizzard around their software that would involve both licensing and digital management (versus managing several copies of the software on hard media).

In order to make this happen, we could use your help.  If you used any Blizzard product in the past, for classroom use or research purposes, drop us a line at gaming@psu.edu with a brief description of your work.  If you have ideas about using Blizzard software for teaching or research, we'd also like to hear from you!  We can work with you to help conceptualize how specific Blizzard software could help meet your teaching or research goals. 

So drop us a line if you have experiences to share or ideas you'd like to explore around the use of Blizzard software.

This summer we are kicking off two engagement projects, the first with Mary Shoemaker, instructor for Chemistry 101 at Penn State.  We met with Mary yesterday to identify a few game concepts that will help students learn basic chem 101 principles around ion charges.  We are in the brainstorming process and kicking around ideas, including a cooperative flash card game with mechanics similar to Google Labeler.

Regardless of the design we go with, what excites me about this project is the potential.  Mary indicated that instructors of Chem 110 will often spend the first week of the semester reviewing content on ions because of its importance.  Looking at chemistry 101 and chemistry 110, this game has the potential to reach nearly 5,000 students annually!  In addition to working on the game, we are also working on an IRB application to potentially collect data around the use of the game and compare it to past data Mary has collected for student quiz scores.  A great opportunity to assess whether or not a game has an impact on student learning in the flow of a course!

Virtual Worlds News is reporting from a recent Gartner Predicts conference that organizations are going to drastically cut travel costs over the next 3-4 years in favor of virtual collaboration solutions, including virtual world collaboration platforms.  Gartner's Steve Prentice says "Companies should put aside previous prejudices and bad memories of older video-conferencing services and seriously investigate these new technologies."  They also mention a couple organizations that are building virtual collaboration tools in Second Life to offer as services to other companies. 

Arriving at the IST building this morning, I found this poster:

We've been trying to track down contacts at EA for a while regarding our initiative, specifically our lab.  I was happily surprised to stumble on to the Facebook group and find a Penn State EA rep as the founder of the group.  Mail has been sent, hopefully in the next few days we'll find ourselves talking with some fine EA folks about our initiative and opportunities for collaboration.