Instructional Gaming Forum (IGFORUM)

3rd Instructional Gaming Symposium: Modding for Serious Play

Since 2006, the Multimedia Production Division has become the official sponsoring division for the “Special Interest Forum for Instructional Gaming” (SIF-IG), as well as the Instructional Gaming Symposium.
We have introduced a session called “Gaming Table” during the last AECT (2006) to showcase some of the instructional games created by AECT members. A variety of games were showcased, including card games, pen-and-paper games, board games, and several digital games / videogame mods. This year, we planned to expand the gaming symposium to include even more presentation formats.

(A) Gaming RoundTables

We would like to see the Game Table session becomes a RoundTable session (subject to approval by the Board and availability of slots). Think of this as a SHOWCASE for serious / instructional games.

If you have created an instructional game and would like to share it with the community at AECT, please submit a proposal for RoundTable (using keyword: Games) to your appropriate Division. Kindly indicate in your proposal that you would like to present it at the Gaming RoundTable. This will help us put all the Gaming RoundTable presentations into one session.

We would like to see a great variety of instructional / serious games (and as many as we can hold), and let attendees see your accomplishments in this area. Please plan on setting up the game (perhaps with a written instruction) to either present it to the participants, or better yet, let them play it. The games can be card games, board games, pen-and-paper games, Flash games, computer games, even mobile (PDA and Cellphone) games! Both independently created or commercially produced game mods are also welcome.

(Note: You will need to bring your own laptop if the game require a computer to run.)

(B) 3rd Instructional Gaming Symposium

This year’s theme for the 3rd Instructional Gaming Symposium is “Modding for Serious Play.”

‘Modding’ is a gamer’s term used to denote production activities in ‘modifying’ an existing videogames to play new contents or storylines created by the gamer(s). We would like to provide a few avenues for the “game modders” in our midst to present your works (serious / instructional game mods) to the AECT learning community.

The 3-hour long Symposium will include:

Full paper session: (1 hour: 2 presenters) – Reading of theoretical paper, or reporting of research and research findings that involve modding digital games as research tools.

Short Paper session: (1-1.5 hour: 4-6 presenters) – Independent and commercially funded mods are welcomed. (If you have a game mod in progress, we would like to know, too.) Each presenter will get 15-20 minutes for a short presentation / discussion about your game mods and their purposes. The purpose is to tell the community what you are doing, and what your research is about. You should SHOWCASE your game mod at the Roundtable Session instead – Note: you will need to send in a separate proposal to present your mod at the “Gaming RoundTable.”) See Section A (above) for more information.

Panel discussion: (0.5 - 1 hour) — The last part of the Symposium will be a Q&A session with presenters from both previous sections (Full and Short papers). The actual duration of the Panel Discussion will depend on how long the previous sessions are.

How to Submit

Please submit your proposal(s) to an appropriate division for review. You should indicate on your proposal that you intend for the paper to be read at the Gaming Symposium. (The division you submit to need not be MPD. In fact, you may stand a better chance of being selected if you send it to an appropriate division based on the purpose and intent of your game.) Proposals submitted will be subjected to AECT’s selection and review criteria. (Please indicate in your proposal: “For Gaming RoundTable”).

Once your proposal has been accepted by AECT, the accepted proposal will then be forwarded to the IG Symposium planner. Not all accepted proposal related to gaming may be selected for presentation during the 3-hour block: (1) there is a limit to how many presenters we can accommodate at the Symposium, and (2) it depends on how many accepted submissions there are. Accepted proposal not scheduled to be presented at the Gaming Symposium will be returned to respective division for scheduling as usual.

Please note that the deadline for AECT submission is February 15, 2007.

To submit a proposal now, visit http://www.aect.org/events/call/

For more information on the AECT Annual Conference, visit http://www.aect.org/

Sony has announced a new Playstation title, Kinetic, for the exercise buffs.

At the last AECT (2006), those who attended the IGFORM meeting have ‘voted’ to merge the IGFORUM with the MPD blog as one, and here’s the result of that decision.

We know you have been waiting for this but several things need to happen first, and timing. With AECTNow.org we finally have the content management software and the access we needed to make this happen.

Thanks for being patient. Over the next few weeks, your communication officer will populate this space with some of the older entries from IGFORUM, before “closing” the other site.

Feel free to use this space.

Here’s Rick van Eck’s (long awaited) presentation. Well he has it in Apple Keynote and I don’t have a keynote at hand to convert it. (His keynote file was to large for upload/download (7-8 MB), but guess what? After the export to PPT & PDF, it became only 1.7MB / 700kB respectively.

Hmm, may be we should not be to quick to label Microsoft as file bloater?

I attached the PDF for you since it is the smallest in file size:

1. Ten Empirical Questions to Guide Digital Game-Based Learning
2. Intelligent Learning Games

Elizabeth Simpson send me this CNN post:
Not playing around: Scientists say video games can reshape education It will be really interesting now to see how the various government bodies are looking into funding games research!

The Federation of American Scientists — which typically weighs in on matters of nuclear weaponry and government secrecy — declared Tuesday that video games can redefine education.

INSTRUCTIONAL GAMING/SIMULATION SHOWCASE

The AECT Planning Committee has recently agreed to the addition of a new event to the Conference program. The “Instructional Gaming/Simulation Showcase” will take place on Oct 13, 2006 (Friday) from 9.15am to 3.30pm in the foyer of the Regency Ballroom of the Dallas Fairmont Hotel.

If you have an instructional game/simulation developed by you or your student(s), we would like to invite you to showcase it here. The 6-hour long Instructional Gaming/ Simulation Showcase will be a free-form event. As such, we intend to place two to four tables in the foyer, allowing up to three game/simulation presentations per table. Presenters can reserve blocks of one- to two-hour slots to “setup shop” and invite conference participants to learn more about their games and to play. A handout or “job-aid” may also be useful for the players.

As instructional games developers, you might be interested in Thinkingworlds by Caspian Learning.

This is the first instructional game development environment I am aware of.

It is built around Bloom’s taxonomy, and has a set of wizards for framing content and tasks in a 3D environment. It still has to grow, but I think it shows some potential. It is in Beta right now: you can register and download it.

[added by csloh]

Although I have yet to see any conference presentation by Created Realities Group, it appeared that they have been active since 2001. Judging from their website, they have been conscientiously presenting their 3D Graphical MOO environment at various educational technology conferences, including AACE’s ED-MEDIA and SITE (Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education).

While I was in Singapore for ICCE 2005, I had the opportunity to meet up with several people involved in gaming. Philip Tan is one of them.

From our discussion on the development platform (game) for game assessment, he had suggested I try Civilization IV because it allows for Python programming.

Now, perhaps Python programmers are easier to come by in Singapore, but I have no such luck here in town. (Well, may be it was because I don’t know where to look and who to ask. So, perhaps it’s my own doing.)

Games, Learning, and Society 2.0 (June 15-16, 2006)

The second annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference will be held June 15-16, 2006 in Madison, WI. The GLS Conference fosters substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how video game technologies – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education. Speakers, discussion groups, interactive workshops, and exhibits will focus on game design, game culture, and games’ potential for learning.

We invite creative and interactive proposals for presentations, discussions, symposia, workshops, debates, respondents, and exhibits on topics and issues related to conference themes. The deadline for submission has been extended to March 3, 2006. To continue providing a high-quality program, all submissions will go through peer review and be evaluated with respect to quality, originality, clarity, and relevance to conference themes. Please visit our website for detailed submission information.