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/

Oblivion has a very interest quest where you entered a painting to help a lady look for her missing husband. The husband, a painter, has a special “TruePaint paint brush” that allows him to enter the canvas to paint life size images, hence his painting are very life-like and detailed. (The following screenshot is taken within that painted world, hence the sky looked like a oil painting.)

I find the (virtual) world in a (virtual) world idea to be a very intriguing. Imagine the virtual world as alternate areas of learning (groups of learning objects/subjects/classrooms), and users are allowed access to these worlds via some kind of metaphoric portals in the game world. (Neverwinter Night allows for some of that: players may step from one persistent game world (server) to another by way of a in game magic portal.)

Back to our painting. Imagine you are walking around in a museum (game world), and you see a painting which depict a medieval room. Who do you want to meet when you step through it? What about a picture of Star Trek? Is this the perfect holodeck or what?!

PCGamer has a very small write-up entitled: “Learning Quest -Instructor Uses Popular RPG to Teach Math, English.”

Gavin Smith of West Nottinghamshire College (England) has created a Neverwinter Night mod for teaching of Math and English for post-16 students. The mod has been officially endorsed as a teaching tool, and the effect it has on the students has been described as “a minor miracle.”

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.)

Well CIV IV (by Firaxis) is out, and I am sure many of you will be:

1. playing it
2. letting your students play it in class
3. planning on using it as a teaching tool in class, and even
4. “customizing” new contents (mods) with the included EDITOR!

And I think Sid Meier knew that many teachers are interested in using CIV in the classroom for learning. Kudos! I have heard that there is a new teacher’s section in their Web site even though I can not seem to find it. (Anyone know the URL?)

Since I know that the game came with an Editor, I was interested in the “copyright” clause associated with it. The following is the section about the Editor.

LIMITED SOFTWARE WARRANTY AND LICENSE AGREEMENT

=snip=
THE SOFTWARE UTILITIES.