The document discusses using computer games like The Battle for Wesnoth to teach skills like programming, design, and storytelling in a playful way inspired by hacker culture. It describes how the game has been used successfully in college courses to teach open-source development. Specific skills that can be taught using the game include programming, graphical design, animation, markup languages, and campaign building.

1. Playful Cleverness: hackers, games and creativity Kaido Kikkas Estonian IT College *** Tallinn University e-RuralNet Pärnu 03.03.10

3. A glance into the historical hacker culture

4. The Battle for Wesnoth: one possible tool to bring the hacker model to classroom

5. Note: get the slides at http://www.slideshare.net/UncleOwl

7. ???

8. Hackers? Aren't they those bad guys who break into computers...?

9. Playful cleverness?

11. A techno-subculture grown out of MIT and Stanford in the 60s (see Hackers by S. Levy) and later forming the backbone of free software and open source movements

12. Playful cleverness: essentially means doing serious work as if it was fun, and taking fun seriously. Some people call it creativity

14. Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen

16. All information should be free

17. Mistrust authority – promote decentralization

18. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position

19. You can create art and beauty on a computer

20. Computers can change your life for the better

22. No problem should ever have to be solved twice

23. Boredom and drudgery are evil

24. Freedom is good

25. Attitude is no substitute for competence

27. Do you speak code, fluently?

28. Has a well-established member of the hacker community ever called you a hacker?

30. social life

32. Friday vs Sunday

33. Excessive speed kills

34. Caring

35. „ Do, or do not. There is no try.“ - Yoda

37. One way to do it is game-based teaching

38. The Battle for Wesnoth open-source strategy game has been successfully used at TLU

40. Hundreds of units in various (6 in default era) factions, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses, 2-5 levels (mostly 3), movement...

41. Day and night cycle vs the unit alignment

42. Economy based on gold, generated by villages

43. In campaign mode, surviving units from previous scenarios can be recalled

44. Missions may vary greatly (even if destroying enemies is the most common one)

47. Design: artwork, maps, overall aesthetics

49. Content is more affected by the other two (or vv)

51. Spring 2008 – TLU third-year computer science students with adequate to expert propgramming skills; more than 20 people (5 teams of 3-5) completed the course

52. Two rather different sets of people - yet the course worked in both cases

53. The point of the courses was not Wesnoth, but the open-source way of development

55. Richard M. Stallman, the Father of Free Software

56. Linus Torvalds and Linux

57. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Note: he is also an active contributor to Wesnoth)

58. The avalanche grows: LAMP, GNOME/KDE, OpenOffice.org, Moodle ...

59. Not freeware: the zero price is not the point

60. The point is in collaboration, community, peer review and flexibility (and again: creativity)

62. Graphical design

63. Animation

64. Markup (a possible step before moving to XHTML, XML, AJAX etc)

65. Event-driven programming

66. NB! Easier to 'sell' to non-technical students!

67. The good thing is that these can be mixed and balanced according to the audience, allowing a good range of accommodation

69. Choose/build units for main characters

71. Draw the map (considering terrain and starting points)

72. Choose units and recruitment scheme

74. Test and balance

76. On the other hand, several interesting attempts have been made to base totally different storylines on the Wesnoth engine

77. Eric S. Raymond has written the Wesnoth campaign design How-To: http://www.catb.org/~esr/wesnoth/campaign-design-howto.html

78. Wesnoth map editor

80. Converts Wesnoth maps to fancy graphical maps

81. A plugin for GIMP as well as an online service

82. Available online at http://www.sellner. org/wercator/

84. At first, choosing among ready-made ones is more than enough. The unit list for v1.8 is at http://www.wesnoth.org/units/1.8/C/mainline.html

85. To create new units, tutorials are available at http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Art_Tutorials

86. In the newer versions of Wesnoth, multi-frame animations, shadows, different view angles etc are used, making unit design quite complex

88. Tags written in the form of [tag]

90. Storytelling part explaining the situation

91. Map data (can be included, but is typically linked)

92. Day/night cycle and difficulty specifications

93. Prestart part (definitions of sides, objectives etc)

94. Event-based buildup for the scenario

96. Teaches good structure (opening and closing tags, correct use of parameters) as well as 'the big picture' (campaign level)

98. A crazy story involving a lot of famous characters from various tales and also some celebrity-based people (including three Danish robbers Caspar, Jesper & Jonathan, Tchapai & Petka, Matti the mage (and former ski-jumper), Chuck Norris, King Toomas Hendrik, Santa Claus, and a very undead Osama)

99. Will gradually feature more complicated techniques, the 2 existing scenarios are quite simple

101. Wesnoth is a versatile tool for teaching a number of things

102. People can do marvellous things when not hindered by stupid artificial obstacles

103. Taking the fun seriously can result in a serious result without losing the fun factor :)

104. Additional recommended reading: http://wiki.kakupesa.net/index.php/The_Playful_Cleverness_Reading_List

105. Thanks! The slides are available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license at http://www.slideshare.net/UncleOwl