Playful Cleverness Revisited: Open-source Game Development as a Method for Teaching Software Engineering

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    Playful Cleverness Revisited: Open-source Game Development as a Method for Teaching Software Engineering - Presentation Transcript

    1. Playful Cleverness Revisited: open-source game development as a method for teaching software engineering Mart Laanpere Centre for Educational Technology, Tallinn University Kaido Kikkas Institute of Informatics, Tallinn University Estonian Information Technology College
    2. The A-Ha! Experience
      • „ In that instant, I as a Christian thought I could feel something of the satisfaction that God must have felt when He created the world“ - Tom Pittman at MIT after successfully running a computer program; around 1975
      • „ IT WORKS!!! :) Our campaign really works! Well, it´s not an extremely huge piece of coding-art, but at least it´s playable. Feels funny to play it :) I was quite sure it would never reach this point.. If there was more time it would be nice to develop it further” - Sonja Merisalo at TLU after completing a campaign for Battle for Wesnoth; Dec 2006
    3. Playful Cleverness
      • A characteristic of the hacker culture (in its original sense)
        • Doing serious work in a not-so-serious manner
        • Originality and creativity dominate over routine
        • A manifestation of the Linus' Law on motivation:
          • Survival
          • Social life
          • Entertainment
    4. The roots
      • MIT Tech Model Railroad Club 1946
      • The Signals & Power Subcommittee
      • First computer science classes in 1959 (TX-0), PDP-1 in 1961, Project MAC in 1963
      • MIT AI Lab in 1970
      • Formation of the culture
      • For more info: Hackers by Steven Levy
    5. Not business as usual
      • “Computer science” ~ “rocket science”
      • Too few people to form a market
      • Military undertones
      • Software was machine-specific
      • Hackers kept apart from managers
      • => Playful Cleverness: original display of creativity unhindered by market motives
    6. Decline and return
      • 80s: business growth, microcomputers, software as a proprietary product
      • 1984: Richard M. Stallman founded the FSF
      • 1991: Linus Torvalds created Linux
      • 90s: Internet, Linux, LAMP, KDE, GNOME....
      • 2000s: The hackers have returned
    7. The hacker way
      • Two major aspects
        • Open Source: public development, flexible and unhindered participation, no external burden
        • Playful Cleverness: informal management, “ha-ha, only serious!”, grassroot innovation
      • Technology and management – both are important
    8. Case Study: the courses
      • Two courses at Tallinn University
        • Open Source Management : autumn 2007, Master level, 6 students with backgrounds in education and media
        • Methods and Practices of Free Software : spring 2008, Bachelor level, 23 students with background in IT (incl. software development)
      • Both courses used teams of 3-5 people
    9. Case Study: the tools
      • Environment: Trac (wiki, ticket-based workflow), Subversion
      • Target: The Battle for Wesnoth
      • Each team had to build a mini-campaign for the game, using web-based teamwork
    10. The Battle for Wesnoth
      • One of the best free/open-source games
      • Turn-based strategy (single or multiplayer), lots of different units, day/night cycle, XML-like markup language, central server for campaigns, large active community
    11. A screenshot
    12. A snippet of WML [event] name=prestart [objectives] side=1 [objective] description= _ "Resist until the end of the turns.“ condition=win [/objective] [objective] description= _ "Death of Ryan" condition=lose [/objective] [/objectives] [/event]
    13. Why Wesnoth?
      • Initially, for the OSM course,
        • it matched better the diverse background of the participants
        • it allowed for a wider range of different sub-tasks
        • it sparked the hacker-ish innovative creativity
      • Yet it worked with the IT people as well
    14. What does it teach?
      • Developing a scenario for the BfW requires elements from three different areas:
        • artistic/visual (units, maps, screens etc)
        • narrative/verbal (story)
        • technical/logical (WML)
      • For comparison: “How To Become A Hacker“ by Eric S. Raymond
    15. The building process
      • Storyline , events, scenarios
      • Main characters and related unit types
      • For each scenario
        • Design (objectives, events)
        • Map design (terrain ,starting points)
        • Units and recruitment scheme
        • Coding
      • Coding the campaign summary
      • Testing and balancing
    16. The results
      • Well-received by the diverse group
      • Lots of creative solutions (including some non-standard campaigns)
      • Tools were adequate, but more Web 2.0 could help in a full distance setting
      • The Playful Cleverness was grasped well
      • The game approach helps non-tech students
    17. Ideas for the future
      • Test the same approach on other IT and media courses
      • Try other free/open-source games (also from different genres)
      • Combine the experience with social software, 3D virtual worlds (OpenSim, SL) and other distributed environments
    18. Thank you! Further contact: Kaido Kikkas kaido.kikkas@kakupesa.net Skype: kakuonu Server@home: http://www.kakupesa.net

    + Hans-Joerg HappelHans-Joerg Happel, 7 months ago

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