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Documenting and reflecting on DGBL/
André Chercka, Special Ed teacher, Gamer, VJ. @vexmand on twitter
Based in Copenhagen, Denmark
Here’s a game to consider for Social Studies and maths: Naval War: Arctic Circle(demo). I stumbled on it while browsing through the Steam store, there was a demo there, so I gave it a try. After having played for about an hour, I started getting the hang of it. I think the game is interesting since it takes a rarely explored angle on geopolitics: The Arctic Circle and the Baltic.
Usually we see games taking up conflicts in the Middle East, but quite seldom do we see this perspective. I find that interesting in a time where we see Russia challenging the UN and western nations over the conflict in Syria. A game like this can help spark conversation and awareness about political interests in the Arctic, and how this ties into world politics.
Admitted though, I haven’t given the game a thorough test, but for what its worth - this might inspire someone to explore the possibilities.
The game is basically a strategy game that allows you to control different vessels of war on a map, letting you battle it out as the commander of a countries’ naval warmachine.
As the pictures I’ve posted show, there’s a lot of maths involved in playing the game: Nautical miles/kilometres, windspeed, percentages, distances, scale and speed. All factors that need to be mastered and understood to succeed in the game.
Here is some documentation from our 2nd week of working with leveldesign in MinecraftEdu. There’s some students talking about what they’re working on and also some footage of students collaborating in the planning phase. The part with three students infront of the interactive whiteboard is my favourite, it was a great achievement for us to see students work together like that. There’s also some footage on the pacman meets counterstrike project, here my colleague, Jesper presents how they worked on the project - also in glorious danish!
A few screenshots just to give an idea. The player controlling pacman sees everything from above. His objective is to free the hostages. In every corner of the level there is a powerup for pacman, making him invincible for a few seconds. Ghosts see the level from the player POV.
This game has been named “Pacstage”, derived from “Pacman + hostage”. This is the result of a team of 3 students and a teachers’ work over a course of 6 weeks, where they worked on the project 2 days a week. My colleague Jesper, was the project leader and basically got the students to generate all ideas, engineering and content. We are currently working on documenting the final result on video, hopefully it will hit this blog soon.
More photos from a quest.
Tuesday 27.3
Today was the last day to do final editing and tweaking. In our startup chat I emphasized the days focus - final detailing and playability. Students were focused and surprisingly good at getting to work and following up on loose ends
I tested some quests and found that there were still many obvious flaws making them still unplayable. I think the test phase needs to be emphasized in future projects like this.
Some of the building had needed firmer guidance at a much earlier stage. Some puzzles became too time consuming and difficult and needed a clear path to be followed. Some of these puzzles might have been more playable if I had supplied students with a workflow structure that would help them build more systematically. Maybe a good pre-project exercise here could be simply building puzzles with focus on challenge vs rewards and flow.
Wednesday 28.3
Today we focused on absolute final tweaks and documentation with videos and screenshots. Again there was an eagerness to perfect their work - a real “just one more block” - kind of spirit. Before we started I made an effort to explicitly explain the order of the assignments they had to complete, and knowing my students I knew I’d have to follow it up. As suspected, they didn’t quite follow through on what I told them, and I had to do a round reminding them what was agreed on.
These assignments were particularly important for me since it was saving their final versions and creating screenshots and video to document their work for the presentation.
We delivered an intense presentation of our workform as well as our products. We had our principal come up as our special guest - I hope we assured him that learning with games is a method with serious perspectives.
Final Thoughts
Reflecting on the project as a whole, the theme of chaos vs control seems to underly many of my issues. I would tend to having more control, not to restrict - but more to create clearer stuctures, hereby allowing freedom within these boundaries. Our workform has been project- based and requires constant reevaluation and adjusting, something that doesn’t fall easy to our group of students. So I think well defined boundaries and phases of work would increase productivity and ultimately give creativity better grounds to unfold in.
Screenshots of an underground lair, complete with traps, redstone mechanisms and puzzles
Tuesday 20.3
Today we were to test first playables, move on to detailing and choosing focal points. There was some file logistics that had to take place before the testing could start, so the first hour went with that.
I could see that the groups who had followed the phases of work that we had planned and who were able to structure their work had no problems in moving on to detailing. But the groups who didn’t have any overview of their work had a hard time knowing where to pick up the work from last week. I could see that students who couldn’t structure their work were those who needed to be told exactly what to do. And when they were told, they would do a good job.
We did testing and students seemed quite entertained. Many of those testing found it hard to pick up the trail of hints - and I can see that those building often don’t have their users in mind. This is a constant issue with our students when designing levels - they forget to design the levels with a user in mind.
Testing also holds an important part of our learning goals - both the ability to receive- and give constructive criticism. And that they constantly have to have the user experience in mind, and not just build whatever they like.
While building students have mostly been very impressed by the power of the Edu mod - theres been a little frustration aboout bugs, so I think Ill make an effort to collect all their bug reports and send them off to the developers.
Wednesday 21.3
Today we worked on testing, implementing feedback and detailing. For all groups I emphasized the importance of playability before detail. The students who hadn’t been productive enough to meet their deadlines were those who had lost oversight and lost themselves in detail.
Our progress until today is probably as far as we will get with building, so we have to start reflecting on our work and preparing for the presentations next week. I feel we haven’t had enough time to test and implement feedback, and I think this could have been countered by aiming at completing first playables a week before we actually did.
Hammergroup
The team is working together as a group, which is rather unusual for our student, but really cool. They´re really good at meeting up by a computer, usually the editor programmer, to debate textures and gameplay features. It seems the project has a positive impact on the cooperation amongst the students. Everybody is focused on the goal - to make a cool game, with a twist in the gameplay.
Texturing and optimization of the game is the main focus at the moment.
