A few other recent items of note:

• Kathy, as I mentioned in the previous post, took a three day long Motorcycle Safety Course. While I’m decidedly cool on motorcycle riding (mostly for safety reasons), Kathy’s been very keen on the idea for quite a while. Taking the course seemed a good way to help balance both of our wishes in this area. Kathy did very well, by all accounts, and seemed to really enjoy it, though she came back with a sinus infection.
• On Friday night, Emily helped out with the Southside Community Center’s annual Thanksgiving dinner. Maggie and I attended while Emily worked, and enjoyed getting to hear Representative Patrick Rose speak briefly, followed by the San Marcos Mariachi Academy and The Gospelaires. Both were wonderful fun, and reminded me how fortunate we are to live in a part of the country where live music is so available and appreciated.
• Speaking of live music, on Thursday night we enjoyed the 15th Anniversary Party of The Jazz Protagonists, a trio that features my friend Barry, a brilliant pianist whose weblog really needs an XML feed. We had a marvelous time, enjoying an Indian dinner with Chris, Becky, and Mom McMains beforehand, and the company of even more friends once there. The ensemble played together with the practiced ease of people who know each other extraordinarily well musically — “like an old couple dancing,” as I commented to one of our friends as we watched.
• We’re putting wood floors into our living room to match the rest of the house and hopefully give us an easier time with allergies once the nasty old carpet’s out. We pulled up the carpet and padding, only to discover a layer of vinyl tile beneath. We scraped that up and found a layer of linoleum tile. Pulling that up, we finally got to subflooring. While it turned out to be more work than anticipated, the kids enjoyed the rare opportunity to take hammer, prybar and chisel to the house.
• The kids and I all went to see the new Harry Potter movie. Great stuff, though marred a bit by frequent bathroom escorts and some “tell me when it’s over, Daddy” moments.

Friday night, our weekly(-ish) rehearsal session for the Grant Mazak Band started out as it usually does — the guys trickled into the living room around 8:30pm, instruments and amplifiers in hand, slightly weary end-of-the-week smiles on faces. Kathy was at a motorcycle safety class, and Liam and Abby were at a school field trip, so Emily, Maggie and I were the only ones around. While the girls watched movies in Maggie’s room, we started practicing some of the songs we’re working up for a party at the beginning of December.

After a few, Emily wandered in, Dora the Explorer’s charms having worn thin. We played through Greenday’s Time of Your Life for her — one of her favorites. Grant then said “when are you going to play with us? Go get your guitar!” She’s been learning to play a bit at a time since July, a process that was markedly accelerated when Grant graciously liberated a guitar from the store for her benefit. After a bit of cajoling, we convinced her to come join in the music-making.

For the next hour, we had a grand time, picking out songs that lacked exotic chords and having Grant and Barry call out changes to Emily while she gamely hung in and played along. She did really well, showing an excellent sense of rhythm and anticipation of chord changes, though her fingers occassionally had a tough time keeping up with her brain. Grant, who loves teaching immensely and obviously, helped her with technique and gave her a few exercises to help build the necessary muscle memory. As the rest of the family trickled home, we added Kathy, Abby, and her tentatively-plucked violin to the scene in the living room. (Kathy offered to get out her French Horn too, but we just couldn’t figure out how to orchestrate that into blues songs.)

We had a superb time playing together; I had a grin plastered on my face for about 30 minutes straight while Emily was playing with us. While I’ve really hoped that some of the kids would get into music over time, I’ve been reluctant to push formal lessons, both because our calendar’s already ridiculous, and because I don’t want to risk squashing the pleasure that music can bring. It’s exciting and gratifying to see the kids starting to take an interest of their own accord. While I don’t think we’ll ever be the Von Trapp Family Singers, if we can find joy in making music together over the next several years, I’ll be one happy Dad.

One thing that continually amazes me about Kathy is the amount of energy and enthusiasm she’ll put into something once she decides she wants to do it. Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in the backyard reading a book when she plunked down nearby. “I’m restless. I want to do something. Do you want to play a game?”

“Ehhh…what game?” I responded, still engrossed in my book.

“Maybe Carcassonne?” she said. Normally I love Carcassonne, but we had just played on Thursday (when she had trounced me soundly), so my level of enthusiasm was low. And besides, I was still trying to read.

“I know,” she went on, “Kickball! Would you play kickball?”

“Ummm…ok,” I said, fully expecting that her abrupt enthusiasm would be thwarted by unavailability of willing participants. I was therefore a bit surprised to find that before I knew what was happening, she had pulled a phone from thin air, and in a flurry of dialing rounded up 12 kids in just a few minutes.

My enthusiasm level still low, we marched on down to nearby Crockett Elementary, where we split up into two teams, with Kathy and I acting as player-coaches for our respective sides. We started the game, and somewhat to my surprise, I found myself actually enjoying myself quite a lot as I cavorted around, shouting instructions to the team, running after fly balls, and trying to get the field chatter going. The game was error riddled, and my base coaching was largely ignored (except in the one case where it did more harm than good — sorry about that, Liam!) but everybody seemed to have a good time.

I’m sore today, but again grateful for the enthusiasm Kathy injects into our family and my life. Oh yeah: Kathy’s team walloped ours.

The second day of the Serious Games Summit was no less engaging than
the first, though mercifully a bit briefer. (My brain was pretty much
full by the end of yesterday, and a decent night’s sleep didn’t
totally solve that problem.) Here are a summary of the sessions I
attended, and what I got out of them:

Keynote

Delivered by Dave Warner, who has evidently been involved in a
variety of interesting projects, but presented them with such great
rapidity and deficient diction that I gave up on taking notes before
too long. Highlights included some interesting visualization of
military and humanitarian data, remote sensor arrays, a visit to
Burning Man, and efficacious videogame-based Physical Therapy.

Bulding Civic Cyberspace: Democracy Island

In this presentation, Kerry Paffendorf focused on some prototype work
being done on democracy in virtual worlds using our favorite online
environment, Second Life. The project is funded (rather unexpectedly)
by a grant from the Department of Transportation, which is interested
in using it to gather input on proposed DoT policies. (There is
concern that in the Real World, people have a difficult time getting
engaged politically, as they often don’t know where to go or when
important decisions are being made. The DoT is interested in
determining whether these gaps can be bridged using technology.) The
project is still in the early phases, with a half-dozen law students
participating in discussion, exploration, and tool-building. Kerry
also mentioned a few tools that might be of interest to those of us
exploring SL for instructional purposes: “mixed-reality” lectures
that he’s helped put on, in which a real-world event is streamed into
a SL simulacrum of the building where the event is actually being
held, and ROAM, an SL search engine which crawls the gameworld and
indexes objects and regions by name and owner.

While the content of the presentation was a bit thin, I was pleased
to actually track down several people I’d met in Second Life already:
Kerry is SNOOPYbrown Zamboni, who helped host the Second Life Barnett lecture
last week (and who I embarrassingly thought, based on his avatar, was
a girl); Chris Carella is Satchmo Prototype, who hosted a session in
SL several weeks back on using it as a crisis management simulation
environment; and John Lester is Pathfinder Linden, who has been our
contact at Linden Labs for educational use of the system. Though I
only got to chat for a couple minutes (and missed the Second Life
gathering the previous night because I couldn’t find it), it was nice
to be able to meet these folks face-to-face whom I’d already
developed some knowledge of and respect for in-game.

HazMat Hotzone

This was one of the most interesting sessions in the Summit. Not only
had Jesse Schell of CMU brought in a half-dozen machines on which to
demonstrate their software, he also prevailed upon the New York Fire
Department to provide personnel to work through a simulation of a
chlorine gas leak in a city subway. Each firefighter had his own PC
and headset to simulate the visual and auditory experience of going
into a crisis situation and was required to use “radio” to
communicate with each other, the truck driver, and the dispatcher.
Once on the scene, they donned their repiratory gear (which
restricted their field of view and had an “air remaining” meter as
part of the heads-up display) and headed down into the subway
station, asking bystanders for details of what was going on, helping
ambulant victims to an exit, and preparing to carry out people who
were more seriously afflicted. We were able to watch things unfold on
two screens, one of which showed the view of the officer who was
leading the 3 man team into the station, the other showing the screen
of the scenario administrator, who could float trough the
environment, observing the action from any vantage point, and filling
a sort of “dungeon master” role, where she could modify the training
scenario on the fly.

After the session was concluded, the instructor debriefed the team,
pointing out what they did well, and bringing out places they could
have done better. (Though the rumbling of subway cars in the
background indicated that trains were still running, the team didn’t
contact the transit department to keep the subway cars from pushing
the contamination through the tunnels to other stations.) The Chief
of the New York Fire Academy discussed the changing training needs of
the department in the wake of 9/11, and how training for biological/
radiological/chemical hazards had become a more critical part of
their regimen. Interestingly, both the firefighters and the
programmers cited the realistic graphics as being one of the key
success factors for the simulation — the firefighters became
markedly more engaged once the in-game uniforms were modified to
match their real world gear, randomly blowing trash was added to the
streets, and other realistic touches were added.

Making Educational Games That Are Elegant, Fun, and Really Educational

Catherine Hendrick, Game Producer at gameLab, presented this session.
Much of it was a reiteration of the standard software development
cycle, with a few concessions to the specific needs of Serious Games
— discussion of educational values, assessment, and a determination
of whether an interactive digital game is really the best way to
achieve the educational goals. People on the instructional side of
the fence who want to work on creating games should, first off, play
lots of games to gain an understanding of how they work and what
conventions are, and should consider embracing conflict as part of
the game’s design. Catherine went on to describe two games gameLab
had created: the first was a web-based stock-trading simulation which
was very nicely done, but was never released, due to management
SNAFUs. Real Deal, a card game commissioned by the US Army to teach
stay-in-school skills to students and inspired by Chez Geek, now
reaches over 400,000 students annually.

But Do They Learn Anything? Integration of Learning Management Systems

The last session was hosted by Curtis Conkey, Lead engineer at NETC
Experimentation Lab, in Orlando, FL. He has been exploring the
challenges of integrating 3D simulation games with Learning
Management Systems, which track what courses people have taken and
how they did. The first difficulty is that the NAVY requires all of
their instructional material to be compliant with SCORM, a
standardized way of packaging reusable, web-based instructional
modules. Unfortunately, since SCORM is web-based, 3D games don’t fit
well into it, as they aren’t typically delivered through a web page,
often require extensive setup, and have their own user interfaces.
The second challenge is extracting meaningful data from a play
session in a 3D game: while it might be easy to gather success
statistics is a straightforward single-player snowboarding game, it’s
very difficult to extract good data from a multiplayer virtual world.
(He showed the infamous Leeroy Jenkins video as an example of this —
how does one have an LMS system automatically determine whether this
was a failure of leadership, motor skills, planning, or execution?)
Though he didn’t have any definitive answers to these challenges, I
suspect that this will be an area we at Texas State will need to
explore over time as well.

Conclusion

I got a ton of good information out of this conference. If anybody
would like to discuss particular sessions in any more detail, I took
copious notes on most of them, and would be happy to cover them in
more detail. A big thanks to Texas State University for sponsoring the trip!

The first day of the Serious Games Summit was quite interesting,
instructive, and (for me, at least) exciting. A few general notes
first, and then into the meat of the day:

• There seems to be a general excitement over this field. This is the
  second year for the conference; it’s evidently much bigger this year
  than last, and many folks feel that it’s growing at a rapid pace.
  (One presenter said that she thought Serious Games are at the same
  place as an industry that nanotechnology was in the early 90’s.)
• The Entertainment Games industry is made up overwhelmingly of young
  white males. Judging by the attendees at this conference, this is not
  the case for Serious Games — it’s a much more diverse crowd than I’d
  expect to see at GDC or other game trade shows.
• There are a lot more Macintoshes than there were at the Vignette
  conference I recently attended.
• Interestingly, the technology in some of these instructional games
  is actually more ambitious than that in games designed for
  entertainment. This seems to be driven by the need for people to be
  able to interact with the games in more interesting ways than
  diddling around with a joystick

Keynote

Ironically, this was one of the less interesting sessions to me. Two
speakers discussed wargaming in conceptual terms, and then moved on
to discussing project life cycles for instructional games. I’ve got
more detailed notes, but I won’t subject you to them now.

Ender’s Game for Science and Engineering

Merrilea Mayo discussed how the United States’ performance in the
Science and Engineering fields has steadily worsened over the last
few decades, and discussed some of the instructional reasons games
are a good way to help address that deficiency. She pointed out that
one moderately successful game has the potential to reach more people
than all of the Science & Engineering college programs in the
country, and went on to explain research that shows dramatic
increases in instructional efficiency when using interactive software
for teaching. A few numbers, for those of you who like them:
Cooperative learning raises test scores by about 50% over solo or
competitive learning. Kurt Squires’ research shows that interactive
lectures increased comprehension of electromagnetic theory by 15%,
while allowing students to play with a program called “Supercharged”
instead of sitting in a lecture at all improved their scores by 28%
— an increase especially marked in girls. It seems there’s some
excellent research to point to this being a very valuable
instructional technique.

Inside Our Hidden Agenda: Using Contests to Generate New Ideas for
Games in Education

Lauren Davis (who, incidentally, is an Austinite), discussed the
Hidden Agenda contest, which awards a $25,000 prize to college
students who come up with the best instructional game geared toward
middle school students. It has run for two years now, and has yielded
several worthwhile instructional games. In the first year,
contestants entered a Texas Hold ‘Em game, which teaches probability,
Operation Infinicio, a 3rd person game that requires the player to
use an understanding of physical forces (like friction, thrust, etc.)
to get through a dungeon, ChemPop, a Tetris-style game that has the
player match up elements with appropriate valences as they fall into
a silo, and Mechem, which allows the player to build a combat robot
out of various materials to learn about their characteristics. In the
second year, contestants submitted Algebra Arcade, which teaches
simplifying of equations and which middle school teachers nearly
assaulted Lauren to get a copy of, Gut Wars and Biosaga, both of
which allowed the player to experience the immune system from inside
the body, and Refuse of Space, an Asteroids-style game which uses
exacting realistic physics (and a funny pirate voiceover) to teach
Newtonian physics.

Inside the Institute for Creative Technologies

The ICT has been responsible for a variety of projects, most notably
Full Spectrum Warrior, a game originally developed for army training
which later became a commercial product. They showed off some of
their research: graphics created by doing a laser scan of the
Parthenon and the sculptures therefrom that reside in the British
Museum and reinstalling them digitally, and a virtual human, in this
case a doctor whom one had to try to convince to move his clinic by
standing in front of a screen on which he was projected and carrying
on a conversation with him. The presenters then went on to discuss
the development process, comparing and contrasting the needs of
serious games developers with those of entertainment game projects. A
few things he brought out that are necessary beyond what
entertainment games provide were assessment, to allow one to track
the effectiveness of the game and individual’s learning progress, and
adaptability, to ensure that users actually learn the subject matter,
rather than just figuring out a way to “game the game.”

Measuring Effectiveness in Game-Based Educational Systems

Jan Cannon-Bowers discussed the various types of competencies that
one attempts to foster with games: knowledge, skills (including
phychomotor, cognitive, decision-making, leadership, etc.), and
attitudes. She then identified the characteristics of a good
objective, and discussed various ways of measuring effectiveness,
pointing out that some of the easiest, like gathering people’s “How
did you like it? How much did you learn?” reactions, often were
wildly inaccurate measures of effectiveness. Measuring Training
Behavior or Learning is a better indicator, but is correspondingly
more difficulty to do. Embedded measurement, where the game gathers
data on the user’s performance while the game is in progress, is one
valuable tool in the designer’s arsenal. She concluded by reiterating
that assessment is critical for a variety of reasons, and should not
be neglected.

Using Games to Advance Language Training and Education

This was one of my favorite sessions of the day, as the panelists
demonstrated some fantastic language instruction technologies. The
first was a Blackfoot-language based quest game for the Gameboy. We
didn’t get to see it in action, but I was intrigued to find out that
there are free, open source tools for developing Gameboy
applications. Louis Johnson of the University of Southern California
then demonstrated Tactical Iraqi, a third-person training game used
to train military who are going to be deployed in Iraq with basic
communication skills. He walked through a simulated interaction with
an Iraqui native in which he walked up, removed his sunglasses (as
eye contact is considered important), put his hand over his heart (a
sign of respect when meeting someone new), and spoke an Iraqi
greeting into a headset microphone. The simulation included speech
recognition software, which allowed the virtual native to carry on a
conversation with the presenter, who eventually gained enough trust
to elicit the location of the village leader. Then Sabrina Haskell
from Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated two Japanese language
instruction prototypes they had developed to teach middle school kids
fundamental Japanese skills. The first was Pettochan, a virtual pet
that one interacted with and taught the language using point-and-
click commands. The second was was a brilliantly done RPG called
Kotodama that also used speech recognition, allowing characters to
interact with objects by speaking their names, and to take action by
speaking the appropriate verbs. Both projects used an anime style to
help engage their target audiences.

America’s Army Reception

America’s Army is the blanket name for a whole series of training and
simulation products the army has developed, including a wildly
popular first person shooter. This evening they were showing off lots
of interesting stuff, including large-screen sniping simulations,
remote bomb detonation robot simulations, and a truly wild 3-screen
HUMV simulation with both a driver and a gunner station. The place
was both packed and noisy, however, so I didn’t end up lot out of it
beyond the nifty demos (and a Heineken).

More to come tomorrow…

Alright, I’m harping on commercialism in religion again. My apologies to those of you who don’t find this as absurdly amusing as I do.

Today’s installment: the iBelieve, a replacement cap for your iPod Shuffle that transforms it into an ostentatious white cross. That’s all class, baby! Remember kids, if it doesn’t have a cross or a fish, it’s of the DEVIL!

I want a web award to give stuff like this. Maybe a “Scourgie Award”? It might be time for some photoshop work…

If you prefer your practice of faith with less new-car smell, check out this article on The New Monastics in the Christian Century. Some really interesting stuff about the communities of faith springing up which eschew commercialism and embrace monastic community ideals, albeit somewhat modified.

I have little to offer in the way of commentary on this Dance Dance Revolution clone aimed at Christians, other than to say it should make some Southern Baptist heads explode.

This past weekend we all went to South Padre Island for the 2005 Sand Castle Days. There had been red tide warnings for the week previous, so we weren’t quite sure what to expect, but when we arrived Friday afternoon, conditions were outstanding — temperatures in the lower 80s, warm water, nice waves for bodysurfing, no jellyfish to be seen, and the clearest water I’ve ever seen at a Texas beach, clear enough that you could see your feet when in chest-deep. We splashed around for several hours and then retired to the room for cartoons and cereal.Mom McMains and Christina joined us later on that evening to round out our eight-people-in-a-suite vacation savings plan.

On Saturday, Kathy helped out one of the San Marcos teams a bit and signed up all the kids except Maggie for the sand castle competition. Liam and Abby were initially a team together, but quickly dissolved in the midst of squabbles over what they would do and how they would do it. Emily diligently worked on her entry, a memorial to victims of hurricane Katrina, for several hours. It was a very nicely done series of images of people surrounded by a giant series of concentric swirls representing the hurricane, and won her second place in her division and $75, which she says she’s saving for an iPod.

Because of the beautiful weather, I quickly lost interest in sand sculpting and appointed myself full-time lifeguard, taking out any of the kids who were interested into the deeper water and teaching them the finer points of body surfing. (“Now you have to shout ‘Woooooo!’ as loud as you can and then run back into the water until you fall down. Why? Trust me, it’s just how body surfing works.”) We pulled up innumerably oyster shells, watched many school of fish swim by and bump against our ankles or jump between us, and explored every possible way to deal with a wave — jumping over, swimming under, smashing through. As the afternoon wore on, the waves got bigger, eventually deciding that instead of providing a nice ride into the shallow water, they’d smash me into the ocean floor instead, which was quite exciting in its own way.

The Grant Mazak Band played that night for a shrimp boil and party hosted by some of the other folks from San Marcos. In addition to our usual roster, we had an extra guitar player, another harmonica player, and our old friend Scott Wade playing a cool little hand drum. There was lots of dancing, lots of energy, and lots of food — altogether an excellent way to while away an evening.

The next morning we visited Sea Turtle Inc., a turtle rescue and rehabilitation center just a few miles down from where we were staying. I honestly wasn’t expecting too much, but the place was fascinating — huge open tanks allowed you to see (and even feed) some of the turtles that the center was taking care of, and knowledgeable guides filled us in on all the details of the different species of sea turtles (of which there are seven or eight, depending on who you ask). We then went and had one last romp on the beach and headed back for home.

I was thrilled that the trip went as well as it did. The Texas coast is one of my favorite places in the world, and this trip had plenty of all of the things that make me so fond of it. It was super fun to get to play in the water with the kids so much, and we were thrilled at Emily’s great showing in the sculpting competition. The only thing that would have made it better, I think, is for South Padre to be closer!

Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told a news conference the confirmed toll so far in Pakistan [from the recent earthquake] was 23,000 dead and 51,000 injured, while India has confirmed slightly over 1,200 deaths.

I find it intensely difficult to square this sort of thing with the idea that we Christians hold that God is omnipotent and cares about the people of our world. If this sort of tragedy were perpetrated by the hand of man, we would surely consider the planner one of history’s worst villians. But when it’s an act of God, how do we process it? It would seem our understanding of God or of goodness must give way in the face of that.

It’s enough to drive one to drink or deism. Mulling…

• We enjoyed a superb celebration of Maggie’s fifth birthday this past weekend. Thanks to all the friends and family who helped make that a delight; it’s a remarkable thing to be surrounded by so many supportive people, and we are deeply and daily grateful for it.
• Daniel and Fanny came back to Texas to attend his brother’s wedding and are now staying with us for a few days. It has been a real treat to get to see these newlyweds again, to renew those friendships, and to bask in the reflected glow of their affection for one another.
• Liam and Abigail both have strep, and Kathy’s dealing with yet another sinus infection. It looks like she’s got underdeveloped sinus cavities, and we’re giving some thought to seeing if it will make sense to send a surgeon in there with a roto-rooter to open things up a bit.
• Our next door neighbor Pete, who once offered to shove a french horn up my tookus, died last week. He was a neat man, and while I enjoyed having him for a neighbor, the memorial service made me wish I’d taken more time to get to know him better. His family loved him a great deal, and are missing him, but take comfort in the fact that he was a committed believer.