Tag Archives: Who’s Who

ISPI

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While searching for information on the Center for Programmed Instruction, I came across this rather interesting history of ISPI [from http://www.icodap.org/ispi/ispihist.htm].

The origins of International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) are intricately related to the formation of a series of fledgling groups coping with the impact of exploding technology and evolving methodologies in the early 1960′s. In September of 1961, Col Gabriel Ofiesh was appointed by General Briggs, Commander of the Air Force Training Command, to conduct a study of the effectiveness of programmed learning as compared to traditional Air Force instruction methods. The 18 month study demonstrated a 33% reduction in time to mastery with a 9% gain in achievement. The study came to the inevitable conclusion and the rest, as they say, is history.

With significant training time savings and improved performance possible, instructional technologies became the focus for many training-minded professionals. The first meeting of the Programmed Learning Society of South Texas was held in January 1962 with the seven charter members from the research community in the military and local universities: Dr. Gabe Ofiesh, Dr. Mike Zaccaria, Dr. Walt Driskill Dr. David Wark, Capt James Gillespie, Dr. Harold Wren, and Dr. Carlton Downing.

A month later, the group had grown to 39 members and decided to form a national organization to be called the National Society for Programmed Instruction (NSPI). Jack Newman wrote the NSPI Constitution and, as the story goes, the most difficult task was getting the members to agree whether the word “programmed” should be spelled with one or two m’s.

New chapters formed very quickly. Actually, the first official chapter of NSPI came into existence when Hilton Goldman formed the “West Texas Chapter” in May of 1962 and called it “The West Texas Society for Programmed Instruction.” The San Antonio Chapter was not “officially” formed until September 17, 1962 with 75 members and Dr. John Olsen as its first President. San Diego became a chapter in October of 1962 and others followed rapidly.

The NSPI National Executive Office moved to Washington, DC in 1968. Hilton Goldman (who was President of the San Antonio Chapter then), maintained a great deal of interest in the activities related to NSPI and got together with Lt Col Russ Gregory in 1968 to found the Armed Forces Chapter of NSPI. Hilton also obtained the sponsorship of the San Antonio Chapter of an award of a $25.00 Savings Bond for the best education- or training-related project at the annual Alamo Area Science Fair.

With the broadening of instructional technology horizons, the name of the organization evolved to the National Society for Performance and Instruction, then the National Society for Performance Improvement and eventually went international to become the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI).

Neverwinter Nights for military

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It was at I/ITSEC 2007 that I first heard about Shawn A. Weil from the folks from Aptima, Inc. (Woburn, MA). It appeared that Aptima (or should I say Weil?) also worked on Neverwinter Nights for a little bit, and had presented their papers at past I/ITSEC (2004/2005).

It looks like they have been busy:

  • Alexander, A. L.; Brun, T.; Sidman, J.; and Weil, S. A. (2006). From Gaming to Training: A Review of Studies on Fidelity, Immersion, Presence, and Buy-in and Their Effects on Transfer in PC-Based Simulations and Games. DARWARS research paper. (PDF)
  • Freeman, J., MacMillan, J., Haimson, C., Weil, S., Stacy, W., and Diedrich, F. (2006). From
    gaming to training. Society for Advanced Learning Technology (SALT Conference). Orlando, FL. 8-10 February 2006. (PDF)
  • Weil, S. A., Hussain, T. S., Brunye, T., Sidman, J., & Spahr, L. (2005). The use of massive multi-player gaming technology for military training: A preliminary evaluation. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 49th Annual Meeting. Santa Monica, CA: HFES. Also found here: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings, pp. 1186-1190(5)
  • Weil, S. A., Hussain, T. S., Brunye, T. T., Diedrich, F. J., Entin, E. E., Ferguson, W., Sidman, J. G., Spahr, L. L., MacMillan, J., & Roberts, B. (2005). Assessing the potential of massive multi-player games to be tools for military training. Proceedings of the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC). Abstract (PDF)
  • Freeman, J., MacMillan, J., Haimson, C., Weil, S., and Diedrich, F. (2005). Systems, studies, and
    strategies in game-based learning. Proceedings of Training & Simulation International (TESI Conference 2005). March, 22-24, 2005. Maastricht, Netherlands. (PDF)

Delta3D: OS Game Engine

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Well, it was at best a random encounter. It started with a listserv posting on members’ opinion of the Top 3 serious games, and Jim Brazell (UTAustin) said, amongst a list of games/software:

Delta 3D – because to me the most serious game simulation is building games. This is the path to human development for Mars and beyond!
And Perry and the Navy are leading open source gaming with a real commitment to assessment.

Usually I am not interested about Game Engine because I don’t have the resources to work with them, but then the comment about “real commitment to assessment” piqued my curiosity. So who this Perry person from the Navy? No last name mentioned, and there is also no posting from any Perry at the SG Listserv. Hmm…

Fear not. Google to the rescue! :-P So it turns out that Jim is referring to Perry McDowell, Executive Director of the Direct3D project at MOVES Institute. Perusing MOVES’ plone site, I found a section dedicated to research papers published by MOVES.

A quick Google search and it was not difficult to find more papers on Delta3D:

Since Delta3D is an Open Source Game Engine, it would of course has a Web site for download, and a wiki for the tutorials on how to work the engine. (Click here for a description of what Delta3D).

Delta3D

And then, a paper caught my eyes: “SCORM reference”!

Why the sudden interest on SCORM? Rick saw the IT_Tracer at AECT and suggested I looked into it. So now I found Brent Smith, Chief Technological Officer (CTO) of Engineering & Computer Simulations (ECS).

What’s really interesting now, is not so much of the Google search. I realized from all these paper and publications, that it is highly likely these are the very same folks who will turn up at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in two weeks time! Which I am already planning to go because of the SG Challenge!

Wow! Life can be so interesting!

Playing to Learn

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The Murphy Winter Report (2005/2006) ran an article about Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul of University of Minnesota using NWN for Journalism. (I have known about someone using NWN for journalism for quite sometime now, but it keep slipping my mind as to who the researchers are… Now I won’t forget.)

Original article: http://sjmc.umn.edu/mreporter/winter2005/neverwinter.html

(Excerpt… ) NWN has another, very important feature: It is sold along with a gamebuilding toolset that allows users to modify the game, and BioWare encourages players to design their own versions of NWN using tilesets (groups of images) which are available legally and online in databases set up by NWN fans around the world. This element of the game is what allowed Hansen and Paul to modify the software for the pedagogical needs of the Jour 3004 course: They replaced the medieval world of Forgotten Realms with the modern world of a small American city called Harperville, and transformed the rogues, wizards, and barbarians into news editors, reporters, and other modern characters.

Hansen and Paul modified the game (with the technical help of Matt Taylor, a colleague at Dunwoody College of Technology) to provide students with an interactive lesson in researching and writing a breaking news story. In the modified game, the student plays the role of a rookie reporter at the Harperville Gazette newspaper. A train has derailed in town and spilled its load of anhydrous ammonia, and the rookie reporter is assigned to write a context piece to help Gazette readers understand the implications of the accident. In the game, the reporter talks to the paper’s editor about a good angle for the story, such as the health effects of anhydrous ammonia, the potential environmental effects, the public safety aspects of the wreck, or issues of railroad safety. Once players choose their story angle, they are free to go anywhere in the newsroom and anywhere in the city of Harperville to research the story.

Players have many options for researching their stories. Hansen and Paul stocked the game’s (news library) with hundreds of pages of documents and sources from online sites, and populated Harperville with dozens of characters who can be interviewed by the rookie reporter, including hospital employees, railroad executives and workers, city hall and emergency management personnel, university experts, and businesspeople. As students move through the information- seeking process, they take notes in a reporter’s notebook within the game. They then file their story, get a printout of their reporter’s notebook, and write a 1,000-word news story with the information they’ve gathered. As the class instructor, Hansen has access to the log of each student’s movements through the game; students must also turn in their reporter’s notebook and their stories so she can see the type of notes students have taken, and how they used those notes in generating their stories.

Since the Jour 3004 course is required of all majors in the SJMC, Hansen is eager to learn if this kind of simulated environment will help her students master the art of gathering, processing, and reporting information. “We know that students today are used to interactivity and that they don’t like to sit still in lecture classrooms being ‘fed’ information,” says Hansen. “What we don’t know is if educational gaming is going to be an effective method of enhancing conceptual mastery of subject matter or complex processes. Journalism education is a great place to test some of these ideas,” she adds, “since journalism students are asked to master both practical and conceptual skills in their courses. Game simulations can offer a realistic world in which to ‘practice’ those practical and conceptual skills without risk.”

For Paul, the NWN project is a natural outgrowth of her work in the INMS, particularly the Games Research and Virtual Environment Lab (GRAVEL). “The GRAVEL project was started to build a network of people at the University who are looking into the use of games and simulation environments as an area of research or application in learning,” Paul says. “But I’m interested in not only talking about games, but in actually applying what we know to real projects. The NWN project was a real opportunity to put up or shut up.”

Paul notes that the NWN project will help answer some larger questions about computer gaming’s role in classrooms. She cites a Pew Internet and American Life study which found that more than two-thirds (fully seventy percent) of college students play video, computer or online games at least once in a while.

It’s always interesting to see how others come up with ingenious ideas to use NWN, or games for learning. :-)

Neverwinter Nights 2 “Research”

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I have finally come across the first report about folks “using Neverwinter Nights 2 for learning and/or research.” I am pretty sure the folks at Heriot-Watt University are somehow “inspired” by the success at West Nottinghamshire — since both Judith Good and Judy Robertson also hailed from the United Kingdom.

But whatever the things they are doing with NWN2, the most important aspect (to me) is the last question on the interview: How are you going to measure the benefit (i.e. learning progress) of the game-based learning project?

Read on…

Hitting the Play Button : HERO

It’s part of a research project at Heriot-Watt University, where researchers are exploring how school pupils can learn through building their own video games. Using a toolkit adapted from the fantasy role-playing game Neverwinter Nights 2, it aims to engage pupils with a range of curriculum activities in literacy, IT and design. Below, Keiron Nicholson, software developer with the project at Heriot-Watt University, explains how it all works. Questions by Charlie Peverett.

How does the concept of Adventure Author go down initially in schools? Do teachers need much persuading that it’s ‘real work’ as well as popular?

There can be initial resistance from teachers, who haven’t grown up with video games in the way that most children have. We did some trial sessions at a typical primary school in Dundee and initially met with quite a cynical response from the teachers, but within a few weeks they’d become very enthusiastic about the project, largely because they saw how much it motivated the children.

In terms of persuading them that it’s ‘real work’, there’s a lot of links to the curriculum that they were keen to pick up on – since a big part of the design is coming up with a story and writing interactive dialogues, it feeds into their literacy and storytelling abilities. They also learn a lot about problem-solving and collaboration, and the teachers in Dundee particularly noted the kids’ willingness to ‘redraft’ their work, which is usually very difficult to get them to do.

Naturally they’re also keen on getting the children excited about an ICT package, since computer skills are a big focus nowadays. I think they feel that anything educational that actually gets kids motivated is a good thing. The teachers even chose to tie it in to additional areas of the curriculum, like getting them to make artwork and adverts to accompany their games.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is pretty warlike. Do pupils playing Adventure Author follow that lead? Do you find pupils are more likely to bring murder and military stuff into their games than, say, if they were doing a creative writing exercise?

The game sticks strictly to largely non-violent fantasy combat as seen in the Lord of the Rings films. Naturally, the game toolkit has plenty of resources for fantasy monsters and swords and sorcery stuff, as this can be a fun aspect of the gameplay. However in story terms, their writing has shown a lot of imagination, and doesn’t seem to be bound by the setting – in fact, they use the restrictions of the fantasy artwork very creatively. They use what’s available to them for what they want to do, so we’ve had stories where werewolves are cast as train conductors, and zombies hang about outside Blockbuster Video! In particular, the girls are less interested in the fantasy combat aspect, and more focused on the possibilities for storytelling and art design – it’s quite possible to leave the ‘warlike’ stuff out of the game altogether.

Have any designs particularly impressed you?

One of the kids at our workshops did a satirical game in which you had to interact with various famous political figures like George W Bush and Tony Blair, culminating in a duel with Jacques Chirac! We thought that was pretty inventive.

If pupils want to go on designing games beyond the time allowed by Adventure Author, what opportunities are there for doing so (either within formal education or outside it)?

The Neverwinter Nights 2 software is commercially available, and will probably be selling at below full price by the time the project is finished. We’ll be providing the Adventure Author software on our website free of charge for anybody who wants it, along with tutorials and teachers’ resources to help things along. In formal education, there’s a rapidly growing selection of courses and even institutions which specifically teach game design and programming. There’s also plenty of stuff on the web that pupils will find useful.

After the trials in Dundee, we found that a majority of the kids were asking for the game for Christmas so they could carry on working on their games, and that many parents then bought it on the recommendation of the teachers. The original Neverwinter Nights can be picked up for under £10, and it provides a fairly gentle start to game design for those wanting to get stuck in immediately.

How are you going to measure the benefits of Adventure Author for pupils’ development?

In educational terms, we’re going to be looking closely at the links between their progress in other areas of the curriculum and their experiences with the software. We’re most interested in the impact on literacy skills, since our results so far have indicated that a lot of kids will engage far more in creative writing within the context of game development, when ordinarily it wouldn’t interest them so much. We’ll also be gathering the opinions of professional game designers, teachers, and other pupils to judge how successful the kids have been at creating a well-rounded and fun video game.