Photos and Stories from the Project Showcase

Last Monday was the Project Showcase for my seminar at the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry. It was held in Cardinal Hall at the L. A. Pittenger Student Center at Ball State University. We had three partitioned areas for the showcase. Guests arrived on the Terrace, where we had ample refreshments including cheese, crackers, crudités, meatballs, iced tea, and root beer floats. The sunlight streaming in through the windows was wonderful, although it also made the photos not come out so well.

In the next room, we had ten stations set up for people to play the beta of Museum Assistant: Design an Exhibit. Eight laptops were arranged on tables along the wall, and on either end, workstations were attached to the very large televisions on the side walls.

The plan was that this room would also hold six displays of physical artifacts that were created during the course of the semester. These artifacts include sketches, prototypes, posters, and other miscellany. However, as we set up this space, we realized that there would not be enough room for the demo stations and the displays, and so we moved them into the presentation area.

This presentation area had about 150 chairs facing a stage, and flanking the stage were two projection screens. The artifact displays ran along the sides of the two seating areas.

Stage left

Stage right

Here are close-ups of the six display boards.

Logos, hand-drawn room art, and screenshots of finished art

Room and character sketches

Concept art, screenshots, and excerpts from our design document

Mostly physical prototypes of our game, along with some storyboards.

At the top is the poster that was presented at the Computer Science Spring Banquet and the Butler University Undergraduate Research Conference. Below, concept art, storyboards, and bagged prototypes.

At the top is the poster created for the Ball State University Student Symposium. Below is the final physical prototype for Build a Museum, the primary contender to Mystery at the Museum. The latter was chosen and evolved into Museum Assistant: Design an Exhibit.

Posted along the right side of the room was a replica Scrum board along with a brief description of how it would be used. Our actual Scrum board was much larger.

I did not get any shots of the whole room, but here's one taken from the edge of the seats during set up. Immediately to my left is another projection screen.

Five of the twelve team members spoke during the presentation. We rehearsed several times at the VBC, and they rehearsed once in this space as well. I walked in during this rehearsal and caused a bit of a ruckus, partially to help them realize that distractions are unpredictable and partly just to mess with them. During the actual presentation, as soon as Josh started, every baby in the room started crying. He was well prepared!

There were about a hundred people in attendance, and the presentation was very well received. There were just a few questions at the end, and then we encouraged attendees to enjoy the food, drinks, displays, and the game.

One of the best parts of the evening was being able to meet the friends and family of my students. We have become an intimate group: spending fifteen weeks in close quarters with twelve other people inevitably results in many shared stories about family and friends. It was great to be able to shake some hands and especially to thank parents for their part in grooming this great team.

In case you missed the announcement or any of the links above, the game went live yesterday, and you can check it out at https://sites.google.com/site/designanexhibit. Enjoy!

First week at the VBC, eleven weeks later

Going into the VBC, I hoped to write blog posts about once a week about the experience. The truth is that we work like crazy while we're there, and by the end of the day or the weekend, I find that a good mental rest is in order. Point in case, I was just looking over a few draft posts on my blog—articles I started but never published. Here's one I started in January, in its entirety:

The best explanation I have come up with for my fellowship with the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry is that it's like a sabbatical except that I get to bring students with me. Just over a week ago, I wrote about my anticipation for the start of the semester; now I'd like to share how things actually went.

So much for that.

The inquisitive reader may wonder, "What is it that you do for nine hours a day if it was only yesterday that you were programming?" Here's a glimpse, in no particular order.


We do stand-up meetings every morning at 8:15. Each person reports on what they did since the previous meeting, what they have planned for the day, and what impediments prevent progress. I listen especially for the impediments, though often the ones I hear are not exactly what the students say. I then do whatever is necessary to remove the impediment. This may involve calling meetings, consultations, finding appropriate readings and tutorials, checking the budget, shopping for supplies, and other administrative or managerial tasks.

The team is divided into two bins which we call "The CS Group" and "The Arts & Humanities Group." Each group meets fortnightly to discuss readings, the CS group favoring common readings and the Humanities group individual ones. I sit in on both groups and follow the common reading with the CS students.

I read several blogs and feeds related to the project, and I share the highlights with the team. Some of the sources I've found most helpful are Raph Koster's blog, Daniel Cook's Google+ stream, and Dinofarm Games blog.

I coordinate Thursday Team Lunches. Each Thursday, we all eat lunch together in the dining room and have a topic for conversation, frequently featuring an outside speaker. This is the kind of task that someone who loves event planning could do quickly and easily, but I probably spend too much time agonizing over catering decisions and hoping everyone is happy.

Our Scrum board has four columns: Not Yet Started, In Progress, Requires Validation, and Done. I am frequently used for task validation. For source code, this involves a formal code review. Validation of other tasks is contextual but essentially the same: it is an opportunity for me to look at what the students have done and offer feedback and suggestions.

I try to be available to the team during the day for informal evaluations. Sometimes this is motivated by overhearing conversations from my office, which has no door connecting it to our largest work room. Informal evaluation is done more effectively, however, when I wander through the work areas to see what the team is doing. Quite often, students will pull me in to the discussion to explain something to me or seek my assistance. As with formal validations, I try to use these moments to share what I know as well as help steer the team towards fruitful collaboration.

Occasionally, I directly intervene in game design and interface design issues. Both of these are extremely difficult crafts in which the students are engaged, and it's good for them to have the opportunity to iterate on designs. Because of my own experiences in these areas (read: because I have failed at them and learned from these failures already) I will sometimes see trouble on the horizon and force the students to put on the brakes and re-evaluate.

As Scrum Master, I run the Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective meetings that happen every other week. I also serve as Product Owner, organizing and prioritizing the Product Backlog—the list of user stories that guide the team towards successful project completion.

Several of my VBC students are searching for jobs and internships, as are some of my best students who I could not bring with me. I've written letters of recommendation and provided references for many of them, and I'm glad to say that the effort has been mostly fruitful. I hope those who are still looking for employment and internships get some good news soon!

Since we've been building digital prototypes, I help with quality assurance. I run the game and try to break it or look for usability flaws. There is a defect board in the main work room on which we record such issues, and the team is pretty quick to fix them.

I make the coffee almost every morning. Earlier in the semester, I noticed a disturbing trend wherein people would arrive very close to 8:15—the time of our daily stand-up meeting—but still try to make coffee before coming to the meeting. They would end up coming into the stand-up late, though happily carrying a fresh cup. I realized that I could circumvent this problem by showing up a bit earlier myself and starting the coffee, even though I bring my own from home. This is a nice example of proactive removal of unarticulated impediments.

My non-VBC responsibilities still exist too, of course. I have had a paper accepted at FDG 2012, and I had to spend some time revising it for publication. I consult with my advisees over email or by appointment. The Mira Award nomination that Ronald Morris and I recently earned was the result of writing thousands of words on the Morgan's Raid project as well as a formal presentation. I talk to my department chair a bit over email about important issues such as curriculum and assessment. I also served on a search committee for the first time this year, and I'm excited to have a new colleague joining the department in the Fall. Early in the semester, I continued to serve on the Strategic Planning Committee.


So there you have it: a quick sketch of what has occupied almost all my waking hours since January. It has been an incredible experience. Since the very beginning, I have had a deep sense that, professionally, it is where I belong. I try not to think about the fact that I'll be going back to the regular grind of higher education in a few weeks, but that's the topic of another post.

The Frisbee Analogy

I have spent a lot of time looking over the source code for the VBC project, both informally and through formal code reviews, but yesterday was the first time I personally contributed code. One of the non-CS students was working on revising the game's introduction, putting in some placeholder stills in preparation for a meeting with our community partner. She was looking for a way to easily advance through the images as in a slideshow, and so I offered to whip up a script to do this, which I did. I reported the activity during this morning's stand-up meeting, and I used the opportunity to remind the team that I was available for this kind of help. I ended up spending about six hours today in the trenches, working on my own code as well as helping others to write or refactor theirs. It was much more hands-on than the kinds of reviews the students tend to request. I really enjoy working side-by-side with the students, and it makes me feel immediately and undeniably useful. The teaching moments percolate up from the problem domain as well as the problems introduced by novice developers.

We have had an informal tradition of after-lunch Frisbee at the VBC, a tradition that is greatly enjoyed by all participants. We postponed today's to end-of-day Frisbee, which gave us the opportunity to finish all of our milestones for the day, which we did. As we were playing, one of the students pointed out that without bad throws, there cannot be great catches. By extension, if everyone threw perfectly, there could be no stellar catchers. Another student—one with whom I worked on several pieces during the day—pointed out that this was like their relationship to me. Their programming is far from perfect, but they know that I'm a seasoned catcher who can keep the bad throws from ruining the game. It may be one of those analogies that one has to take at face value, but I'm impressed by the capacity for analogical thinking and honored to have been part of it. After all, my programming skill is clearly greater than my Frisbee skill.

Visual representations of team prototyping efforts

The most important task for my VBC students during the first two-week sprint was game prototyping. We had six themes in which we worked: geology, biotechnology, collecting/museums, children making a difference, trains, and dinosaurs/paleontology. Rather than dictate specific targets for each theme, I decided to allow them to explore any themes they like, using their preferences to gauge where they are finding interest and inspiration. The best of these would be subject to analysis by the whole team, and we would choose a small subset of those to move forward into the next sprint.

One of the students suggested using a table to track progress, similar to the task board we are using as part of Scrum. Based on this sound advice, I used the day before the start of the sprint to draw the table shown below.

Prototype Development Board, version 1.0

The rows represent the themes, and the columns represent phases of design: planning, production, testing, and done. In this case, "done" meant ready for more careful evaluation by the whole team. The idea was that each student would write his or her name on a sticky note and march it across the board as it is developed. After a few days of prototyping, the board looked like this:

Prototype Development Board, version 1.1

Then the question arose: what to do with a game that, after testing, needed more work? I advised the student to simply move the sticky note to the appropriate column on the left, and that this was an expected part of the process. It hit me like a ton of bricks: the tabular format assumed a left-to-right progression that was wholly incompatible with a cyclic design process. I yanked all the sticky notes from the board and revised it into the following:

Prototype Development Board, version 2.0

Now, game concepts start in the upper-left ideate phase and progress clockwise through build and playtest. After testing, they either go back into ideate or, if they are abandoned, they end up in the graveyard. This presentation clearly captures the cyclic nature of design thinking. Topologically, it's still a table—you could cut it at any of the red lines and spread it into a conventional rows-and-columns approach—but the visualization of the data makes all the difference. Later, we added a shelf (as in "put it on the shelf") for those concepts that were complete enough for this first pass, those that could be evaluated by the team at the end of the sprint.

Prototype Development Board, version 2.1

At the end of the sprint, the 13 students had created 29 prototypes. We spent the afternoon before the end of the sprint playtesting thirteen candidate prototypes. In this case, a simple tabular view was used to list the games, their creators, the number of players, and whether or not any given student had tested it.

In the Sprint Review meeting, seven of these were discussed as fitting within our mission and scope. For the record, the discussion of each candidate should have been timeboxed: sitting in comfortable chairs around a fireplace can get people talking longer than necessary to make a decision. Be that as it may, for the first pass, each student was asked to mark which game was their first choice for moving forward.

With one exception, the students clustered around three ideas. The one outlier consented to abandoning her first choice, and so with just one iteration, we had selected our three to move forward. In the subsequent Sprint Planning meeting, we rearranged personnel so that each team had a mix of students from Computer Science and Arts & Humanities. As I write this post, we are midway through Sprint 2, and the students have explored many variations on the core mechanics of the three prototypes.

135 Hours

Last Friday marked three weeks at the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry. The students and I have been working together in roughly an 8–4 schedule. In the first week, I ran a workshop on games and learning, and the next two weeks were run as a Scrum-style sprint. At the end of these three weeks, the students have produced some good prototypes, sufficient for us to have chosen three to carry forward; more importantly for the learning process, they produced many, many more prototypes that are not being carried forward.

The students worked roughly nine hours a day for fifteen days. Given that a fifteen-week, three-credit course should involve nine effort-hours per week, the students' effort has been equivalent to a complete conventional three-credit course. Unlike a conventional course, my students have had practically limitless space, budget, and mentor availability. The only structural benefit that a longer class would have is more calendar days to consider the concepts, but I posit that the number of distractions that occur in a longer period far outweigh the benefits. Therefore, the result of my students' effort on Friday in terms of both understanding and artifact production can be considered the best one could possibly hope for in a three credit-hour course. Yet, we still feel like we have barely scratched the surface of the conceptual space: the prototypes we created are still very rough and will require significant iteration prior to engaging in final production.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone who understands game design and learning: it's only been three weeks! One would never expect that after a three-week intensive study, a novice would transform into a great painter, or be able to work as an architectural consultant, or to commercially compete in any creative design field. Three weeks of intensive study just gets you to the point where you can start to understand how far down the rabbit hole goes, how much there is to understand and how much practice you will need to advance.

This stands in stark contrast to the pressures of immersive learning, in which we faculty are asked to guide students through a process to create useful products for or with community partners. Keep in mind that I am an advocate of immersive learning, having written several papers and a book chapter on its benefits to Computer Science and interdisciplinary education. However, I also know that if we had taken any of these prototypes and started production halfway into our three weeks together, it would have been painfully premature. It's true that we could have made something by switching all our resources to production rather than understanding, but it certainly would not have resulted in anything academically substantial. We know that we can make a Bejewelled clone and slap a quiz on it, and many people will applaud this as "educational game design," but we're trying to do something much more significant.

I am eager to see how the team advances through this next sprint, as our focus narrows and we collaborate on three design. The goal is that two weeks from now, one of these will have risen to the top, and we can move into production, with executable releases every two weeks thereafter.

Moving in

The week before the semester started, I moved into my temporary office in the Kitselman Center. I found a department systems administrator so that I could borrow a cart to haul my workstation, books, plants, and miscellany from the fourth floor down to my wife, waiting by the loading dock with our van. I took the cart from the third floor up the elevator to the fourth and loaded it up, and when I returned to the elevator, I found this.

Here's the whole scene.

Unsure of what to do, I walked downstairs to tell my wife we would be indefinitely delayed. On the ground floor, the elevator doors were open, and there was a technician standing atop the elevator car, tinkering with the system. He told me it would be quite some time before he was done, but he offered to help me if my need was urgent. In about fifteen minutes, he was able to bring the elevator up to four and back down for me. I've never had any interaction with Murphy Elevator Company technicians before, but this gentleman was helpful and polite, and we had a nice chat about elevator maintenance on the way down.

My wife helped me load the van, and we drove the ~2.5 miles to the Kitselman Center to unload. Here's a glimpse of my office for this semester.

Not too shabby. To the right is a gas fireplace. Yes, that's right. On Friday, I walked to work in the snow, and when I got there, took off my boots and set them by the fireplace. In my office.

Anticipating tomorrow

This Spring semester, I am a fellow with the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry. Yesterday I made public a blog that my students and I will use to write about the experience, and my post there explains the context. In a draft of that post, I had two paragraphs about how I got here, but this topic seemed more appropriate for this blog. The VBC blog is for the project; this one is for me to reflect. So, without further ado, here's a reflection of how I got to this point as a Computer Science professor at Ball State.

My first Summer here, I led a graduate seminar on game engine programming. I have always been one to tinker with game development ideas, though at that point, I had not finished and published any game-related projects. I was and am still interested in object-oriented design, especially design patterns, and so I used the Summer to investigate the relationship between classic software design patterns and game development. Looking back, this was my first experience with pure project-based learning, although I would not have known to call it social constructivism at the time; my intuition told me that if I got a bunch of interested grad students together for a few weeks with an interesting topic, we would all learn something. And we did. In fact, it was this Summer that I developed the essential components of EEClone, my case study for design patterns in games.

I continued this line of inquiry with a group of undergraduates and my colleague, Fu-Shing Sun. Each of the students developed their own game based on the design patterns that I introduced. I am still proud of the systems that these students created. Although the game designs were primitive, the software architectures were beautiful. Of course, software architecture was the focus of the course, so this is to be expected.

The Honors College was supportive of our desire to investigate multidisciplinary game design and development.  For two semesters, Fu-Shing and I team-taught a pair of courses, one on game design and one on game programming. The first semester, we were assisted by graduate student Ben Dean, and so we were able to create three small multidisciplinary teams, each mentored by one of us. The three games created out of this experiment were quite good, capable of being polished and released although none of the students were interested in continuing with them past the end of the semester. The other semester of this experiment, we created one larger team working in two parallel units: design and programming. This allowed us to focus each unit's attention on mastering their side, but the results were predictable in retrospect. Because the groups were working separately, there were several communication problems, and no amount of content expertise can overcome the challenges of bad communication patterns. It was a good learning experience for all involved, but the quality of the end result did not scale up with the number of people on the team.

These two semesters provided me with a great experience, and we took the opportunity to write a few papers about our experiences. My future direction for this line of inquiry was unclear, but I knew I wanted to be more involved in both the design and development sides of the class. It was around this time that I met History Professor Ronald Morris, who convinced me that there were ample opportunities in history education game development for elementary school students. This led to the Morgan's Raid project, which I have blogged about extensively; the postmortem is a good starting place if you're new here. As I've mentioned before, the Spring semester of Morgan's Raid—during which I led a team of ten students in a studio learning experience of finishing the game design and development—was the most rewarding activity of my professional career.

That's my reflective summary of how I got here.  Many semesters, proposals, and research papers later, I feel as ready as I can be to mentor my team this Spring. I feel like all of these previous experiences have led me to the VBC, a dramatic next step for my teaching and my scholarship. My mild nervousness about an untested team is tempered by the fact that I know half of them quite well, and the rest have shown themselves to be bright, polite, and motivated students. I have planned a workshop on games, fun, and learning for the first week of the semester, and I am eager to see how the team engages with the readings, discussions, and activities. On Tuesday, we meet with our community partner, the Indianapolis Children's Museum, to sort out the details of the project with respect to schedules, expectations, and capabilities. This will help direct the discussions through the rest of the week, and after that, I switch from teacher to coach, handing the reins to the team of students.

Recruitment for the Virginia Ball Center, Spring 2012

(My proposal to the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry was recently approved, and so begins recruitment. What follows is the statement I will be spreading around campus in order to recruit students into the project. I welcome your feedback on the announcement itself, and I encourage you to share the announcement with any BSU undergraduates who might be interested.)


In Spring 2012, I will be mentoring a team at the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry (VBC) in a seminar entitled "Games and Learning: The Underground Railroad." We will be exploring the intersection of play and learning within the challenging context of American slavery. The team will work together to design and develop a game based on the Underground Railroad, a game that is both fun and educational, whose playing and enjoyment will result in a deeper understanding of the theme.

This is an ambitious student-driven project, and its success requires a team of talented and dedicated students. Game development requires creativity and interdisciplinary collaboration. We will need artists, writers, programmers, editors, marketers, managers, musicians, and researchers. The input of historians and anthropologists will be as important as that of designers and technologists.

Our community partner for this project is Conner Prairie Interactive History Park. We will also be visiting the Indiana State Museum, the Levi Coffin House, and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

The VBC provides a unique experience in undergraduate education. It is the ultimate immersive learning experience: students spend the entire semester working together on this one project, meeting in the beautiful Kitselman Center off the main BSU campus. Students earn fifteen credits for participating in the VBC seminar, and the VBC staff and I will work with your major and minor departments to ensure that you continue making progress in your studies through your participation.

The application process involves completing a form and providing two letters of recommendation, with interviews following. Application instructions can be found online.

About the faculty mentor: I am an associate professor in the Computer Science department, and I have been researching game design and development with BSU students since Summer 2006. Our most ambitious project to date has been Morgan's Raid, a history education game for Indiana 4th-graders developed over three semesters. I am interested in software development, board games, computer games, and the science of teaching and learning. Much of my recent scholarship has been on what people learn by creating games, and I am excited to work with an interdisciplinary team at the VBC.

Contemplating creative inquiry: a call for partners

One of the unique features of Ball State is the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, known locally as "the VBC." The center supports seminars that: explore the connections among the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology; create a product to illustrate the interdisciplinary study; and engage the community in a public forum. The faculty and students who spend a semester at the VBC are completely committed to the project: the faculty member is relieved of all other teaching and university service responsibilities, and the students earn full-time credit for their participation. The seminars themselves are held off the main body of campus, in the beautiful and inspiring Kitselman Center.

I am considering applying to run a seminar in the next academic year, having talked the possibilities over with a few key people, including my department chair and the director of the center. A VBC seminar would be the natural evolution of my work on game design and development. All of my previous projects share a common shortcoming, namely that they have been shoehorned into 3-credit experiences under conventional university scheduling constraints. A VBC seminar is an opportunity to collaborate with students in a legitimate studio environment. In practical terms, we would really be an indie game studio.

I would like to use the seminar to create a game, created by following principles of agile software development. The two missing specifics are the community partners and the game itself. One compelling idea is to build upon my experience with the Morgan's Raid project to make another explicitly educational game for school-age children, potentially on the Underground Railroad. I already have collaborators and potential community partners for such a project, and creating software for K-12 has a high impact factor. Another option is to make something subversively educational. I agree with Raph Koster's theory that fun and learning are intrinsically tied, and it would be a great design exercise to make something superficially "simply fun" that, in fact, teaches 21st-century values.

This post is both a reflection and a call for partners. If you are part of an organization that has a compelling story to tell, or are in the games industry and want to explore strategic partnerships on community-focused developments, or you have a crazy idea that just might work, let me know. You can leave comments here of course, or you can email me (firstname.lastname at gmail). VBC application materials are due at the end of the calendar year, so there's time to bounce ideas around.

Thanks for reading. By the way, if you're a BSU student who will be around next year, think about participating and spread the word. I want the cream of the multidisciplinary crop!