What else is on the wall?

In my last post, I described some of the fun stuff on the wall in the studio. There was one piece I didn't describe, because I did not know its story until I asked the team today:

I had assumed it was some programmer art that was put up as a counterbalance to the excellent drawings by our resident art major. In fact, this monster was drawn by one of the kids who playtested our prototype last week Wednesday. What an excellent piece of community-connected inspiration! 

Symposium on Games in Academia

I founded the Serious Games Knowledge Group at Ball State University about two years ago, I think it was October 2013. The premise of the group was to gather faculty from across campus who are interested in games as learning tools, defined quite broadly. From a small core, we grew to about a dozen faculty and staff. The university's concept of a knowledge group, as I understand it, is to bring faculty together to produce scholarship and, potentially, grant proposals. Our group has met roughly once a month over lunch, where we share our stories about games we are studying, games we are developing, conferences we have attended, and articles we are reading. There is great diversity in our group, but this diversity has meant that we have not collaborated with any shared purpose: while the sharing of our individual work is enriching and enlightening, it has not yielded any scholarly artifact that we can point to as our own. In some ways, we have operated more like special interest group than a knowledge group.

This came up in our first lunch, and we agreed to do something about it. This Friday, the Serious Games Knowledge Group is sponsoring a Symposium on Games in Academia, 2:00–5:00PM in BL104.

https://sites.google.com/site/symposiumongames/

We put out a call for presentations at the end of September, and I was pleased to receive fifteen high-quality proposals—enough that we had to reserve a bigger space! The presentations represent an even wider variety of interests than the Knowledge Group itself, and presenters include tenure-track faculty, contract faculty, faculty who teach at the Indiana Academy, university staff, and undergraduate students. The event will truly be a celebration of our diversity of interests, a chance to share our stories in a more formal and thoughtful environment. Refreshments are being sponsored by my department, and there is a wide selection of door prizes that have been donated by area companies and individuals.

The event is free and open to the public, so if you're in Muncie this Friday, please feel free to come join us. Eva designed this flier to advertise the event, and you are welcome to post it and share it. I'll make some time to post a follow-up on my blog after the event.

Social networks, fairies, and Club 369

One of the CS222 project teams is working on Club 369: The Game. "Club 369" is a reference to the Computer Science undergraduate lab, RB369, and the camaraderie that the space affords. The game is a Computer Science quiz constructed of multiple-choice questions.

On Thursday, the team gave their milestone presentation. Here's a screenshot of their executable release.

Club 369: The Game, Milestone #1

That guy on the bottom-right is "The Dr. G. Fairy". Let's take a closer look...

The Dr. G. Fairy

Clicking on him removes two of the incorrect choices, leaving the player with a 50/50 chance if they guess. Needless to say, this presentation got quite a reaction from the other students. When a student asked, incredulously, "Why?" a team member responded, "He's Dr. G. He helps you learn Computer Science." This is the nicest complement I've received in some time!

After class, one of the students posted the picture to the Ball State Computer Science Facebook Group, where it became a hit. It may seem a bit silly, but as I see it, it's a great success for the department. We created the Facebook group to help foster a sense of community among our students and alumni, and we've had some luck with members sharing informational links, job opportunities, and the like. The fact that students feel they can share this kind of fun content as well shows that we have succeeded in our goal. (I had to do a bit of legwork to understand the Butterfree and Hey! Listen! references in the comments, but this made it even more fun for me.)

Of course, I immediately changed my Facebook profile picture to the Dr. G. Fairy. This led some old friends to reminisce about the classic "Get Paul some shirts with color" Flash animation—a reference to my proclivity to wear black when playing at Higher Grounds Coffeehouse. I think we all assumed the animation was lost to the ages. My clever and creative friend Matt was able to find the old image and recreated the animation with a brand new feature.