Transition from class to the Real World!

This blog was started as part of the final class I took to complete my M.S. in curriculum development and instructional technology. I am now a Master of Science!

I will remain Muffle Wumpus for as long as that identity serves as a touchstone for my continued efforts to realize the dream that started all of this. Perhaps it will become the "superhero" identity that has been at times a component of that dream. This post will outline a history of the dream and detail its current state, ending with a description of the roadmap as it stands now.

I.

My dream started as a desire to create intuitive, bite-sized bits of fun software that provides adult language learners opportunities to have a little enjoyment while advancing their proficiency. The intuition is not a new one, and there are many companies and people that would describe what they are up to as a variation on the theme. I conceived a desire to be part of that, and to contribute meaningfully to the development of this particular type of language learning technology.

After an abortive attempt at creating a Kana-memorization app in Java (I was studying Japanese at the time and was about 30 years old) I decided I needed to study CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) formally. This began a five-year period of different types of formal study which may or may not have gotten me closer to my goal of being among the inventors of the worlds most effective language-learning software (In a later post I will spell out my current understanding of a) the state of CALL, b) what I think the next steps should be, and c) what I'm personally most ignorant about and am actively trying to know in greater detail).

The formal study began when I had the great fortune to study computational linguistics with Richard Sproat at the University of Illinois. At the time I was employed there as a "research programmer" and had the benefit of being able to take classes for free. I developed the intention to parlay that experience into a graduate career in CALL, which I had discovered was an entire field of academic inquiry, complete with its own scholarly journals and university departments. I wanted to study at one of those departments and follow that route to become a CALL professional.

At around the same time, I made a move that would seem to run counter to the achievement of my academic goal, but also serves as an example that underscores an important tension in the overarching ambition of bringing imagination and energy to the development of language teaching with technology. That tension, at least within me, is characterized by the combination, and sometimes clash, of twin excitements: that of the possibilities inherent in the current state of communications technology, and the excitement I get from teaching language skills to engaged and motivated students. The former has been a bit of a national craze since the beginning of the mass-popularization of the Worldwide Web, which was dampened only slightly by the dot-com crash of the early oughts, and continues today through the popularity of social media and the proliferation of mobile devices.

The move I made was to quit technology work and get a certificate in teaching ESL, and then get a job overseas teaching English in face-to-face classrooms. At the same time I had submitted what I thought was a strong application to the CALL program at a major university famous for its technology innovation and entrepreneurial orientation: Carnegie Mellon University. The first foreign country I got a job in was Brazil, and  few months after I arrived there I got a belated notification that I had been accepted at CMU. There were, however, a couple of snags. First of all, I had already accepted another ESL position in Japan and was excited to go there, and second, the Language Technology Institute at CMU, where I'd been accepted, had discontinued it's CALL program. So I deferred acceptance and went to Japan for a year to teach.

History or fiction?

Along with a couple other classmates, I attended an event the other night in Second Life. It was a lecture by one Spiff Whitfield, of the Virtual Pioneers, about using online games to teach history. This was my first experience actually attending to a teacher for an extended period in a virtual world. One thing that's certainly true for me is that it was an improvement over other online lectures I've attended that used the more standard webinar software.

The slide show was there (and could be opened in a browser) but it was embedded in an environment that also included a 3D model of a building relevant to the subject under discussion, as well as other objects that could be explored.

Spiff projected himself as an avatar of the historical figure he was discussing, along with the rest of us projecting our own avatars. This made for a more lively online experience, which is always good for a history lecture.

I lurked silently, not wanting to impose too much of my presence in a context where I still felt very much a guest. But one topic that came under discussion had me thinking even after I logged out. An important point that Spiff stressed was that he found troubling the fact that there were historical inaccuracies in a supposedly historical game. I wasn't sure whether he thought it was something game companies should be careful not to do, or that it was a thing history educators should watch out for - their students learning the "wrong" history from the games they play. Pragmatically, I think the latter perspective make more sense. If games are indeed a modern fiction genre, at least in some instances, then we should give them as much credence as we give Dickens, for instance, in the liberties he takes with the French Revolution in "A Tale of Two Cities". It actually made me remember a project I did for a high school history class, in which I tracked down all the events in E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" and attempted to verify their historicity.

Maybe someday games will be taught in one type of humanities class, as written fiction is today, and can be evaluated in history or social studies.

One comment I remember about William Johnson, the figure supposedly maligned by the game: "His descendants should sue them for slander."

Continuing work on the tic-tac-toe game in Joykadia... I've gotten the root script to recognize all of the win conditions. That dense block of code is the final version of the check_win() function. I discovered that the logic test operators can only take two arguments, so I had to break up each test into two separate ones, since each win condition involves verifying that three positions contain the same piece. Remaining tasks: 1) Figure out how to delete the pieces when the game ends, 2) Reintegrate the turn-taking logic, and 3) Assemble the whole thing into an attractive, playable object.

More exploration

This image from the Second Life world "DaVinci Gardens" This place is really interesting. It's like a theme park, science and art museum all in one - just like Leonardo would have created, I imagine. We flew around in what seemed like a very faithful 3D functioning rendering of one of his rotary flying machines and were treated to views of various reconstructions of architecture, an active volcano, a pirate ship and more. I felt like I was cruising around in the mind of the great renaissance polymath.

The above image is the view through a telescope in an observatory tower. It's amazing to think of what can be done with the ability to control the user's viewpoint.

A working, teaching g-w/g in SL!

On Genome Island in Second Life, I've discovered an actual working educational game-within-the-game.

Well, maybe it's not much of a game, but it's neat. What you see is an interactive demonstration of mendelian inheritance (remember Punnett Squares from H.S. bio?). In the left-hand distant flower pot you can see the original two parent plants, on the right is the first generation. The 16 plants in the circular bed represent the third generation. Clicking on them allows you to create multiple third generations to see how the traits, in this case height and color, are inherited. 

Here's the SLURL for it: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Genome/165/71/49

The info card mentions another area where you can learn about chi-square analysis, which may be similar to one of my wild-arse ideas. I'm going to check that out next.

Game building

Here I am puzzling out how to proceed with the tic-tac-toe game-within-a-game. So far, I've made game cels that can rez objects that are in another object's inventory, learning, along the way, that objects have inventories just like avatars (well, similarly). I've gotten a bit more comfortable with some data types that are specific to lsl, such as, vectors, which encode positions of objects, among other things. I've also learned about quaternions, which is the data type for the rotations of objects. Right now I'm in the middle of figuring out how to make the script for the whole game (which should be a complex linked object) interact with the scripts in each individual cel. The idea is to have the game check for a win situation (i.e. three of the same element across, down or diagonal) every time a piece is placed in a cel. I have no idea if this is the best way to go about doing this with SL object and lsl, but I'm forging ahead!

Building, building

I think my fall through the rabbit hole will be deeper this time. I'm almost sure of it. I'm more excited about the idea of writing scripts to determine the behavior of objects. A few more tutorials and I'll be able to make games within games. Has anyone created a virtual world within a virtual world? The mind reels; it's turtles all the way down! Ok, maybe something like tic-tac-toe first. But I'd like to look into including voice recognition so objects can be programmed to interact via speech. Anyone know if that's been done?