[game_edu] Three SIG Updates - a short newsletter

S. Gold goldfile at gmail.com
Thu Oct 16 19:28:15 EDT 2008



I. Where is Susan?
II. Global Game Jam
III. GDC 2009


I. Where is Susan?
I guess the first SIG update is that I have moved ­ I am currently in
Vancouver, BC Canada as a faculty member and International Development
Manager at the Master's of Digital Media Program (MDM) at the Great Northern
Way Campus (GNWC). It is a very exciting Master's program that I am excited
to talk about and very happy to be welcomed into their program. GNWC is a
collaboration of four major universities in Vancouver ­ Simon Fraser,
University of British Columbia, Emily Carr and BCIT. I will be traveling a
lot for the job, one of my many responsibilities is to recruit grad students
for our program. It is also my hope to be able to share with everyone I
meet traveling the great things we are accomplishing in the SIG towards Game
Education. I will be starting a faculty affiliate program at MDM that I will
invite everyone to apply to participate once I get it up and running.

My November travel will be taking me to the Bay Area, Philadelphia and
Montreal. This upcoming year I will primarily be traveling to China,
Latin/South America, Scandinavian countries and the the USA. If you are from
these areas and would like me to speak or visit you at your school, please
touch base with me off-list ­ my school contact info: susan_gold at gnwc.ca.


II. Global Game Jam
The second SIG update is the incredible effort and hard work being put
forward in the Global Game Jam. We have some really devoted and extremely
hard working people putting this project together. A new website will be
online hopefully by November for sign-up to the Global Game Jam. We are
looking for some more volunteers to help with things like sponsorship, PR
and communication. Please let us know if you have some free time to devote
to our first GLOBAL event.

Here is what I think is the final list for cities doing Game Jams (and note
an * means there are more than 1 location)

1. Atlanta * - SCAD / SPSU
2. Austin ­ Austin CC
3. Baltimore - UMBC
4. Boston * - NU/MIT
5. Cape Town ­ U Cape Town
6. Caracas ­ pending location
7. Charlotte - UNCC
8. Chicago - DePaul
9. Copenhagen - ITU
10. Dallas - Guildhall
11. Derby ­ Uni Derby
12. Hamar, Norway ­ Hedmark CC
13. Hanover, NH ­ Dartmouth
14. LA - USC
15. Lima - DAS
16. London ­ GameLab London
17. Madrid - Complutense University of Madrid
18. Montreal - Champlain
19. The Netherlands - Utrecht
20. NYC * - Columbia Teacher's College / NYU
21. Orlando - FullSail
22. Paris - Enjimen
23. Perth ­ pending location
24. Pittsburgh - ETC
25. Portsmouth, UK ­ Uni Portsmouth ­ closed location
26. Rio de Janerio - Federal Fluminense University
27. Santa Cruz - UCSC
28. Sao Carlos - University of Sao Paulo
29. Savannah - SCAD
30. Sault Ste Marie - Alogoma
31. Sydney - UNSW
32. Tel Aviv ­ Open School
33. Toronto * - McMaster
34. Rochester - RIT
35. Vancouver - MDM

I have a few more days to accept host cities, but I really think this is a
great list. I am trying to find a second site for Los Angeles, so if anyone
in that area can host, please contact me. Another area very under
represented is San Francisco ­ the closest location is in Santa Cruz. If you
can host a jam in the Bay Area, please ping me as soon as possible. Sadly, I
worked very hard to try and get Asian schools to participate, at this time
none of the schools have stepped forward, I will work on it for future
years.

Also, just because you are not hosting does not mean that you and your
students can not travel to a location and participate there. This Jam
experience is about working outside of your comfort zone, being thrown into
a mix of unknowns and having fun creating something new.

III. GDC
We have put together a great two day set of sessions for GDC. This will be
posted on the GDC website next week. Jose Zagal has put out a CFP for our
poster session, please email me if you need to get another copy.

I am taking this opportunity to give you the inside look at what we have
planned for GDC:

Essential Tools for Game Education Success
At the 2009 Summit game educators will discover experimental and inventive
educational approaches that they can bring back to the classroom. This is a
rare professional development opportunity for novice or experienced game
educators alike. In this 2-day / 2-track workshop we will be exploring areas
of innovative design and programming. There will be game blasts,
post-mortems, interactive hands-on workshop sessions, great keynote
speakers, a poster session and a networking lunch with industry. Special
invited keynotes will be given by Jane McGonigal and Jesse Schell. The
overall goal is for participants of this workshop to be able to integrate
knowledge gained into new classroom activities, resources, discussions and
curricula.

Monday
Workshop 1a Non-Digital Design
Brenda Brathwaite, Ian Schreiber, Charles Shami
No code? No problem! Professional award-winning game designers and academics
Ian Schreiber and Brenda Brathwaite along with game arts prof Charles Shami
lead participants in this hands-on workshop designed to teach methods for
teaching game design without the need for computers or programming. Using
all non-digital methods, participants will experience a variety of different
design challenges that can be applied in a range of curriculum from
community college to the graduate level. Participants will leave with 20
unique exercises designed to teach game design.

Workshop 1b Rapid Prototyping with Blender
Jeremy Gibson
In educational, 3D game prototyping, the most important factors are cost,
ease of use, and speed. Amazingly, all of these come together in
GameBlender. As an extension to the impressive, open source Blender 3D
graphics application, GameBlender adds logic to Blender's beauty,
transforming scenes into interactive experiences. In this hands-on tutorial,
you will install Blender on your own machine (only an 8MB download
http://www.blender.org/) and work with us to learn the basics of this
amazingly powerful prototyping tool. Through the course of the workshop,
we'll look at GameBlender's graphical "logic-bricks" programming
capabilities, its built-in physics simulation, its easy user-interface
integration, and finally its easy extensibility through Python scripting. By
the end of the workshop, you'll not only have a working prototype in your
hands, you'll also understand how you made it. Please download the software
on your laptop prior to this session.

Working Lunch
Poster Session
Jose Zagal
Topics of interest include: Game program design and development; Game design
and development in traditional classes; Interdisciplinary collaboration in
game programs (both for students and for faculty); Support for Games
Education Programs. Additionally, we welcome posters detailing research
results relevant to the themes of the summit as well as posters highlighting
or showcasing student experiences in games education programs. Student
experiences can be showcased in the context of their capstone or class
projects.

Global Game Jam Project Blasts
Susan Gold, Anders Højsted, Gorm Lai, Zach Lehman, Ian Schreiber, Miguel
Sicart
What happens when you take a mix of people with varying degrees of expertise
(game industry professionals, students and hobbyist) remove all the
marketability, production and publishing constraints, leaving only the game
design constraints and group these individuals together for 48 hours to make
games? Now what will happen when we replicate this event simultaneously
around the globe with groups of different cultures and game play styles and
ideas? What kinds of games will we see? Does such an organized event create
innovation or chaos? Come join us to find out.

This presentation will share the insights and experiences with project
blasts of the most interesting games that are produced in the first Global
Game Jam event which was held simultaneously around the globe (January
30-February 1, 2009). The takeaway for this presentation is two fold: it
allows attendees to explore new ways of identifying what turns a good idea
into a good game by looking at a wide range of brainstorming and rapid
prototyping done as well as share observations on the various international
approaches to problem solving and new insights into team interactions.

Keynote
Jane McGongial



Tuesday
Workshop 2a Putting the pieces together: The MDA Framework
Robin Hunicke, Malcolm Ryan
Despite the flurry of recent titles, game design literature remains a bag of
scraps, containing a lot of valuable wisdom but struggling to find a
coherent thread to hold it all together. The MDA
(Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics) framework [1] is a loom with which we can
begin to weave the pieces together. It poses three fundamental questions:

1) What kinds of fun (aesthetics) does the game produce?
2) What patterns of play (dynamics) create the fun experience?
3) What are the rules (mechanics) that generate these patterns?

In this tutorial we will show how these questions can guide analysis
and criticism of games, and also structure our design process for the
creation of new games.

[1] http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf

Workshop 2b Mini Games in C++
Joe Linhoff
This programming workshop focuses on the creation of mini-games using C++
and OpenGL. A mini-game is a game that can be created by an individual, in
a week or less, in a single file, with simple graphics/content, a simple
core mechanic, and one game level. During the workshop, a few fully
functioning mini-games will be presented along with all of the related
teaching material needed to integrate the mini-game into a programming or
game development class. Classic games tend to work well as mini-games. The
games presented in the workshop include mini-games based on Pong, Asteroids,
and Missile Command. These mini-games can be used to target and teach many
programming and game development concepts.

We will use all freely downloadable tools, including Microsoft's Visual
Studio C++ 2008 Express Edition. Materials from the workshop include all
the files needed to build and run the games, a list of the learning
objectives for each mini-game, and PowerPoint slides for the class. The
mini-game based on Pong requires a little knowledge of C++ and could be
integrated into a first year CS course. The other mini-games build on
programming skills. Please come to the session with Visual Studio on your
laptop.

Lunch
Industry Lunch
Oren Ross
The Industry Lunch will feature Industry Professionals discussing what they
require, expect, and hope for from recent graduates of game education
programs. They will discuss required knowledge-base, portfolio development,
internships, and job expectations. This will be a chance for the educators
to question the professionals about helping the students gain job
placements, and also work as a great networking session. After a brief
introduction from all the industry professionals, the educators will get
lunch, and then join the professionals at different tables to discuss
pertinent ideas and methods for continuing to develop relationships within
the industry. After lunch, each table will be given the chance to discuss
the major points they took away, followed by a quick recap by the Industry
Professionals to answer any outstanding questions.

Student Independent Game Festival (IGF) Post-Mortem
Magy Seif El-Nasr
IGF student competitions are always full of exciting and inspiring new game
ideas. This session will outline short postmortems where students, finalists
of the IGF competition, share their ideas, process of development, and their
learning process.

The takeaways of this presentation are many, besides sharing insights of the
process and resources cultivating such creativity, the presentation also
allows instructors to see what other students were able to accomplish in
different game programs and institutions around the world. We hope that such
ideas and insights will inspire other students and faculty when stories of
them are shared among all others around the world. Discussions of what
students did and how they were able to accomplish it will also result in
takeaways that may inspire instructors to enhance their own programs in
their respective schools.

Keynote
Jesse Schell


Susan
IGDA Education SIG Chairperson
--
Susan Gold
goldfile at gmail.com

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
Oscar Wilde

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