Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

Have you heard about EGC Works? It's a new offering from the EGC. Every several weeks, our "Mr. Podcaster" Jamie Oberdick interviews a PSU faculty member that has worked or is working with the EGC. These 10 minute interludes are a great way to catch up with the EGC during a walk, the drive home, or time at the gym. Check them out!

EGC Works Podcasts

Podcast #1:  Ecoracer Game Accelerates Learning in Penn State Engineering Course

Peter Idowu, Electrical Engineering at Penn State Harrisburg

Podcast #2: Guitar Hero Enhances Learning in Music Education Course

Ann Clements, School of Music, Penn State University Park

Podcast #3: A Virtual Hacienda in Second Life

Gloria Clark, Humanities and Spanish at Penn State Harrisburg

Podcast #4: Second Language Learning Immersion via World of Warcraft

Steve Thorne, Department of Applied Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State University Park

Though its been a bit longer than I had intended since my last update, I wanted to take a few minutes to show off some new screen shots from ChemBlaster

These screenshots were taken from the game's second level, which deals with ion identification (as compared to level 1 which is about element identification).  Though the core gameplay is the same, in level two, the player fires positive and negative charges at randomly generated elements to build out 10 of a possible 30 cations or anions. 

As you can see if you compare the new screens to the old ones, quite a few new interface elements have been added since the last update.  A few highlights for your reading pleasure:

• Logisitcal additions have been made to the interface, including a score field, timer, current target, and progress meter (right hand side), as well as a level indicator (bottom left as well as background). 
• A "targetting sight" has been added to the blaster itself, allowing the player to fire with greater accuracy (visible in the second screen - a small white cirlce near the top of the board)
• Improved completion animations (screen 3) create an explosion of confetti after a successful "blast" as well as reinforcement of the element/ ion/ or compound blasted on the right hand side of the screen.
• An optional "Elemental Aid" has been added to help players who might be struggling or playing the game on their own without an acompanying chemistry class.  By default, the aid is toggled off (screen 1) but it can be activated at any time and will scroll each of a level's possible targets along the bottom of the screen (screens 2 and 3).  Activiating the aid will cause a score or time penalty. 
• A "next ball" button added to the end of the upcoming blast balls bar (a light blue circle in all screens).  Though not necessary for level 1, this allows players to increase the speed of a playthrough by cycling right to the charge or element they want to fire next.  An advanced feature that will help players improve their score and maximize class bragging rights.

Next up on the ChemBlaster agenda is the addition of compound levels as well as conducting student testing to make sure the game scratches chemistry students where they itch.  Stay tuned for more updates and maybe even a gameplay video in the near future.

What a great idea!

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/09/17/nyu-poly-students-challe...

Why not take some course content and wrap some game activities around it?

The EGC participated in the PSU Libraries 2009 Open House over the past several days. We had a booth in the main check-out area, and talked to quite a few students about educational gaming and the new EGC Lab. Wow - it's always good to talk to the students.

Day two of the event we brought in the new Beatles Rock Band. The Beatles are timeless, so it's maybe not so amazing that traditional age students know the tunes and the lyrics. We even had the Nittany Lion sit down at the drums for a song!

In addition, the EGC worked with the library to help conceptualize an Augmented Reality Game (ARG). The premise here was that our President, Graham Spanier (an amateur magician) was practicing a magic trick and it want awry, causing a Nittany Lion statue in the library to disappear. Your job in the ARG is to scour the library for clues that eventually lead you to a "reverse the spell" spell that bring the lion back. View the great intro video for the ARG done by the PSU Digital Media Commons.

Fun stuff, and if you complete the ARG you are entered for a prize drawing of a Dell laptop! So far 53 players have completed the ARG, with six days of play time remaining.

All told, this was great event, and I'm happy the EGC was invited to participate. It helps us keep current on student thoughts in the realm of gaming.

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!

A ED 322 Visual Culture and Educational Technologies

The course provides a foundation for innovative integration of digital technologies in art making, viewing, and teaching.

Long Desc -

The purpose of the course is to develop skills, questioning attitudes, and uses for technology in art and art education; and to engage in electronic mediated communication and new media artmaking. This course is for both undergraduate Art Education degree options: (1) Schools, and (2) Museums & Cultural Institutions. The focus is on students' constructing a critical understanding of technology as a cultural interface in contemporary art, visual culture, and art education. This course addresses issues, practices, and potentials of instructional technology for art education. Course participants explore the pedagogical implications of intertextual Webs, hypertext & hypermedia, blogs, simulations, virtual reality, threaded dialogue, WebQuests, online games, media communities, collaborations, adaptive and assistive technologies, and media-rich "student papers." This course emphasizes the importance of sharing perspectives in an educational context, and on how e-learning course tools, along with specific teaching strategies, can facilitate shared perspectives.

A grad student teaching the course approached me several weeks ago to request space on Penn State Isles in SL for this class. I was happy to grant the request - SL is perfect for it. Here's a shot of the build so far:

I've asked the grad student to provide more info as the class rolls - so hopefully I'll have more to report here soon. It's great to see this PSU resource being utilized - you really should stop be and check out the many projects underway in this space.

Mark your calendar for the 2010 TLT Symposium

Faculty are invited to learn and share effective uses of technology to enhance teaching and learning at the free Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. The Symposium will take place on March 27, 2010 at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel in University Park. The theme of this year's symposium is "Digital Scholarship and the Culture of Teaching and Learning." Our keynote speaker is Dr. Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities. There is no registration fee and a continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. For more information and updates, please visit http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/.

The Penn State community is invited to attend an open house of the new Educational Gaming Commons Lab September 2 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in 6A Findlay Commons at the East Halls, University Park. The lab is in the basement and can be accessed via the northeast stairwell. Equipment in the lab includes eight PCs arranged in groups of four for team gaming, as well as an Xbox 360, a Playstation 3, a Nintendo Wii, five 52-inch LCD panels, a ceiling-mounted projector, and a whiteboard. Faculty can reserve the lab to use for course-related gaming activities and research. When it is not reserved, students are welcome to use the lab. Fall and spring semester lab hours will be 8:00 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. During the open house, hourly prizes will be awarded. To learn more, visit http://gaming.psu.edu/ or e-mail gaming@psu.edu. The Educational Gaming Commons Lab is a service of Information Technology Services.

Thanks to the great work of ETS Multimedia Developer Zac Zidik, we're happy to show off a first look at the ChemBlaster game as it comes to life.  Though the scoring mechanic and several other interface elements are still under development, these screens can give you an idea about where things are headed.  

What you see is based on the game's tutorial level, which will eventually help students to pair element names with their chemical symbols, while learning the basic mechanics of the ChemBlaster itself. 

Stay tuned for more updates!

Though last week's student pilot test of the EGC lab represented a great opportunity to test out the lab's technical capabilties, it also served as our first opportunity to solicit student feedback on the completed space.  Check out the video below to hear what they had to say.