Monthly Archives: October 2009

Gorgeous 2d art, subtle music, puzzles galore and I love the way they demo a pictorial version of a dialog system with a though bubble instead. Anyone played it?

Introduction to Computer Engineering is a course that has about 200 students a year.

It is important to build problem solving and make links to other courses.

The WiiMote

  • can measure +/- G forces @ about 50hz, when it works.
  • has an embedded system that parses data before sending
  • bluetooth
  • has a 1024×768 IR camera that finds the 4 hottest IR sources in the room.
  • cheap!

Wiiwrap is a windows cmd tool that outputs comma seperated values that can be used by another program. For example: “wiiwrap /A | lab6″

This allows the student to write “lab6″ to do something interesting with the data.

This group does not teach physics, but programming. For example:

  • Determine which end it up (if statements)
  • Determine which axis is changing
  • Wiidrop Lab: Put the wiimote in a foam football and throw it, measuring all the cool physics

From the earlier course that didn’t use the Wiimote, they saw a 10-29% increase in motivation based on student surveys.

In the future they are playing with a add-on that adds (2) 2-D gyros.

What are the factors?

  • Complementary skills, strengths and personality traits are relative to the task at hand.
  • Pairs have the least amount of coordination costs
  • Dialectic Creativity. With a partner, its “hard to put out bs and let it stand.” This moves the process from a mental debate to a real debate.
  • Coordination Costs include negotiation, decisions, distribution of work, synchronizing information. These costs are at least linear and more likely quadratic in relation to team size.
  • Motivational Leveling. We all have motivation swings, pairs put this in check.
  • Negotiation in Miniature.  Instead of having different people to “side with,” the individuals in a pair have to negotiate simply.

The goal is to build three models that can be quantified to compare individual vs. pair work

In his paper, they have algebraically modeled three of the above and provided a mathematical basis to understand the gains in pairwork.

Implication: Give pairs more attention

“You also have to prepare them for the work market and social competence”

Representing social networks currently allows for

  • Qualitative Relations
  • Clusters
  • Info flow

But the Negotiation of Meaning and Multiple points of view are not represented in current models and the purpose of this study.

Studying the Negotion of meaning

  • Evolution of concepts – For example, in week one we can track three meanings for a word but ass the weeks go on we can see if those converge. It might be that we just see a stubborn student stay separate.
  • We can also visualize the personal/professional empathy the students have for each others point of view, which will have an effect on any collaboration

To really boil it down, the goal is to visualize different ways that social interactions and perceptions can be visualized over time. MY questions is how those relate to group performance.

Attending a conference can be hard work. There are hundreds of folks presenting about things they are really interested in and the conference organizers do their best to collect those ideas into themes into 1.5 hour sessions. The problem is that every participant is organizing based on their own theme.

If this was simply a wiki, we could just tag-cloud the heck out of it and everyone would have their own custom schedule. In real life however, there are overhead costs of switching rooms and a bunch of work to plan it all out.

That said, here are the themes I am interested in seeing:

informal learning, contextualized learning, project-based pedagogues, new media (social, interactive, mobile)

So here is the plan for today

Monday 10-11

Start in La Princeta Room

Leave Session early, Jump to La Vista Room

Monday 2-4

Start in La Condesa East

Leave Session, jump to El Mirador West

Monday 4:30-6

Start in La Condesa East

Move to La Condesa West

Input Systems

No Player Input

  • Writing on the wall in L4D
  • Training in World of Goo
  • Ambiance

Player Selection

Often a player is able to choose an option and the system responds. These choices are prexisting and the player has little creativity involved. There are a few ways for the player to interface:

  • A multiple choice
  • A mini-game like oblivian’s bribe system
  • In game actions with no conversation mode (Adom)

Direct Input

When it works, it gives the player a sense of creativity. The problem is that it often doesn’t parse correctly.

Templates

“You hit the X and Y wounded him”

This format of text is created by having the player select the x and y. The obvious advantage it that is gives more control to the player that a multiple choice interaction, but is much easier for the system to parse than direct text input.

Output Systems

Scripted

Completely predefined text that plays out like a cut-scene.

Templated

“You hit the X and Y wounded him”

Gives a fair amount of objects. Not good for multiple language support. Limited use.

Generated

Facade and the Postmodern text generator