Readers Respond to Randy Pausch Column

Earlier, I blogged about the WSJ column on Randy Pausch’s last speech before a cheering crowd at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Pausch was one of the founding fathers of Alice, an NSF-supported programming language that is popular with instructional video game enthusiasts.

Jeff Zaslow wrote the original column in The Wall Street Journal that generated the lion’s share of online interest. In it, he gave a synopsis of the speech; I provided a link for readers to watch the speech over at CMU in an update to my original post. In due course, the blogosphere and traditional media were abuzz with the speech and what it meant to varied individuals.

This week, Zaslow follows up his earlier column with another entry in which he describes the widespread reader reaction to his original story. Folks everywhere, Zaslow reports, have gotten a charge out of watching Dr. Pausch’s lecture. Dr. Pausch has asked Carnegie Mellon officials to keep the video of the lecture in the public domain so that it can remain widely accessible.

If you haven’t gotten a chance to watch the speech, now is the time. This is an inspiring final manifesto from academia’s finest.

References:
Zaslow, J. (2007, September 27). The professor’s manifesto: What it meant to readers. The Wall Street Journal, D2.

Popular Science Considers the Difficulties of Videogames

Kudos to Gaming Today for pointing out an article from Popular Science surrounding the efforts developers go to in order to bring us good video games. It’s presented online as a slideshow, but Gaming Today offers a nice summary. Essentially, there are 10 hoops through which game developers must jump in order to produce top-notch games these days. They include:

Processing power; depictions of water; human faces; realistic AI; light & shadows; realistic fire (an evident trend here regarding major processing power); material physics (“It’s no longer enough to make buildings look realistic. Now videogame makers have to be able to knock them down realistically, too); realistic movement; true-to-life simulation (Now programmers across all game types try to pack so many realistic elements into their work—historically accurate weaponry, detailed flight controls …); and motion capture.

My take: I think just about all the challenges listed by PopSci can be met by continued system enhancement and programming. The one I think would most benefit educational video game efforts is realistic artificial intelligence. Imagine a world in which a student asks an avatar for help, and can’t tell if the help comes from a real, live person behind the avatar.

Aussie Media Notes Educational Uses of DS & PSP in Japan

I’ve discussed previously the educational uses of the Nintendo DS, most recently concerning the trend in Japan. Now, The Daily Telegraph (Australia) has an interesting article regarding the use of the DS and the PSP in Japanese schools. Here are some benefits being realized:

* At just one-fifteenth of the cost of a personal computer — around Y17,000 ($A171.3 each — the DS is an economical teaching tool … results in an initial trial showed the English vocabulary of junior high school students using the DS had soared by 40 per cent.
* Saito Miyauchi, 12, approaches teacher Raita Hirai with a bashful smile as he holds up his DS screen. “That’s great!” the teacher tells him after Saito has topped the class by doing 45 multiplications in 15 minutes.
* “The badminton club keeps me busy. But with DS, I can study everywhere, and quickly.”
* “The benefit is that students can look at, hear and write an English word at the same time. With conventional flash cards, you would have two of them at the best,” …“With the game console, you can feel the fast speed and tempo. I think it matches today’s children,” [a school official] said, adding the board had received no complaints from parents.

Lest all the praise be reserved for the DS, the PSP garners its own admirers in the article. A pilot project in Osaka is soon to expand from 38 fourth graders to 800 or more students:

Teacher Toyokazu Takeuchi did not need to print out or check tests. Instead, his own console received real-time data showing which students were making mistakes and what mistakes they were making.
“This is e-learning made in Japan — traditional efforts in reading, writing and calculating coupled with the power of information technology and game machines,” he said.

Finally, the article concludes with the possibility that, since portable gaming devices are so inexpensive, they may possibly serve as an introduction to educational computing in developing countries. In the meantime, the Japanese seem to be enjoying the educational benefit of the DS and the PSP just fine.

References:
Videogames pushed in class. (2007, September 21). The Daily Telegraph. [Online]. Available: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/
0,22049,22456665-5006007,00.html

Halo 3 and OLPC

Two articles are of interest today. One, from the New York Times, reports on the slam dunk that Halo 3 is for Microsoft. Over a million people have already pre-ordered a copy of Halo 3 at one of three price levels: $60, $70, or the $130 version complete with game helmet. Author Seth Schiesel sums up the money involved this way:

The Halo series, set in a future when humanity is battling a hostile alien race, has sold more than 14.8 million copies since its debut in 2001, making it one of the most successful game franchises. The last major game in the series, Halo 2, set a record in 2004 for first-day sales of any entertainment product, generating more than $125 million in the United States in its first 24 hours.

Halo 3 is expected to rake in around $150 million on its first day, a sum surpassing comparable products in other media such as books and movies.

The other big article deals with videogames only in passing, but it also focuses on the polar opposite of big game development, and big money. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal ran a give and take between the One Laptop Per Child organization’s Walter Bender and the co-founder of eMachines, Stephen Dukker. Mr. Dukker also leads a start-up company called NComputing that offers software for inexpensive computer labs. Although few details are revealed in the dialogue, it appears NComputing can offer software for virtual workstations running in the neighborhood of $11/terminal. Mr. Dukker says, “The NComputing solution essentially taps the unused power of a regular desktop PC and enables seven students to use it simultaneously.”

The OLPC has caught my interest here before due to the fact some of the software programs in the distributed prototypes are game-oriented, thus maximizing learning potential. No indication is given if NComputing also offers gaming software in its product. Interestingly, Mr. Dukker brings up several of the oft-heard criticisms of the OLPC project (the money could be better spent elsewhere; it’s not really a $100 laptop; the countries involved have to order huge bulk quantities, etc.), giving the dialogue a tone of debate at times.

It’s an interesting exchange because wherever low cost computing goes, so too will the need for affordable pedagogical software (aka, instructional videogames). OLPC and NComputing are both worth watching from this perspective. I’ll be intrigued to read the research on new software developed for developing world platforms. And I’ll also be interested if any educational efforts come out of Halo 3. Certainly Halo 3 won’t be played on the OLPC product anytime soon (nor was this ever intended). But, perhaps the new game’s capabilities can be put to good use in a future educational product someday.

References:
Schiesel, S. (2007, September 24). Gamers, on your marks: Halo 3 arrives. The New York Times. [Online.] Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/arts/24halo.html?ref=business

Will low-cost laptops help kids in developing countries? (2007, September 5). The Wall Street Journal. [Online.] Available: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118892795619917030.html

Pop.Cosmo: Constance Steinkuehler’s New Blog on VWs

Constance Steinkuehler, over at U. Wisconsin, is shepherding a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to explore the pedagogical potentials within virtual worlds. Consequently, Steinkuehler and colleagues have begun a blog called pop.cosmo. Contributing authors to the blog include David Simkins and Sean Duncan.

In explaining the name, Steinkuehler notes that pop cosmopolitan refers to, “the ways that virtual worlds are becoming novel contexts for the development of new forms of civic engagement in a global, networked world.”  

The blog will serve as a platform for the research team to discuss ongoing research as well as transfer information regarding after school projects and other related goings-on. In a post on Terra Nova, Steinkuehler elaborates on the research team’s raison d’être:

… we empirically investigate key literacy practices that constitute successful MMO gameplay (such as scientific literacy, computational literacy, and reciprocal apprenticeship) & how those literacy practices connect up with life and learning beyond the virtual worlds themselves. Then, based on this understanding, we develop after school instructional programs that leverage MMOs to get kids involved in what we see as core 21st century skills (that are often under-emphasized in classrooms).

It looks like an interesting blog, and those interested in ongoing research of virtual worlds in education should stop by to take a look.

Doyle of Metacritic Wields Mighty Influence

When researchers combine the results of several related studies, they call it a meta-analysis. Marc Doyle, co-founder of Metacritic.com, was profiled in The Wall Street Journal this week. The site operates under similar principles as research meta-analyses. Scores of individual videogames by over 100 critics in varied publications are combined into a single score falling between 0 and 100.

Much as Dick Clark was not as interested in popular music back in the day so much as he was in putting on a show about music, Doyle is reported to not being very interested in playing video games. However, the system that Metacritic and companion site Game Rankings (both CNET properties; Gamerankings.com focuses on videogames exclusively) use to aggregate the scores of games has proven consistently prescient. Wall Street pays close attention to the scores, and the stock prices of gaming companies hinge on Metacritic’s formula when new games debut.

Activision’s shares slid after Spider-Man 3 for the PlayStation was awarded a score of only 50 by Metacritic. Conversely, game company Take Two’s shares soared 20% after their game Bioshock was awarded a score of 97.

Besides stock price, companies have discovered a correlation with a high Metacritic score and sales of a title. Activision conducted market research on 789 games for the PlayStation 2:

Activision Chief Executive Robert Kotick says the link was especially notable for games that score above 80% on Game Rankings, which grades games on a 1-to-100 percentage basis, with 100% being a perfect score. For every five percentage points above 80%, Activision found sales of a game roughly doubled. Activision believes game scores, among other factors, can actually influence sales, not just reflect their quality.

All of this information and analysis, with its subsequent effect on videogame sales and company stock prices, has lent Mr. Doyle considerable influence in the industry.

All of this makes Metacritic’s Mr. Doyle an unlikely kingmaker in the $7.4 billion U.S. games industry. He controls Metacritic’s scoring system, deciding which publications to compile reviews from — a varied list that includes trade magazines like GameInformer, the New York Times, a gamer Web site called Fourfatchicks.com and other outlets.

Many games are tied into other media properties, such as movies. Article author Nick Wingfield notes Time Warner is demanding higher royalty payments from games derived from their films that score low on Metacritic. Presumably, this will encourage game makers with a monetary incentive for producing higher quality games.

My take: Metacritic.com offers another excellent resource for videogame researchers, providing a fairly balanced reference point for the popularity of particular titles. Finding the Metacritic score for a title in order to include it in a paper is quick and easy. Best of all, unlike some of the other corporate research I’ve covered lately, the info Metacritic provides is free to all.

References:
Wingfield, N. (2007, September 20). High scores matter to game makers, too. The Wall Street Journal, B1. [Online]. Available: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119024844874433247.html

Elderly Turn to Videogames to Stay Mentally Fit

The Washington Post had a nice article recently about octogenarians using video games in order to keep their minds fit. A “brain health movement” is sweeping retirement communities nationwide, according to the article. Leslie Walker wrote that Nintendo’s Brain Age and other mentally strenuous video games have joined Bingo, Sudoku, and crossword puzzles as mechanisms to promote brain fitness in the aging and elderly.

Other video games offered by retirement communities to their citizens include one called Brain Fitness, and the virtual bowling game on the Nintendo Wii.

Brain fitness in general is booming, thanks in part to America’s aging population:

In fact, baby boomers may be the biggest catalyst of the brain-fitness boom. They started turning 60, and the nation’s over-65 population will double between 2000 and 2030 — from 35 million to 72 million people. That forecast has triggered an entrepreneurial rush to supply them with anti-aging products.

Next, Walker plugs a couple of related blogs, including SharpBrains.com, with whom I’ve recently traded links:

A growing body of research suggests that mental activity in middle age and earlier can help later in life. As a result, Web sites such as HappyNeuron.com are springing up to offer online games to people of all ages, while blogs like SharpBrains.com provide commentary on the fledgling industry.

Finally, Andrew Carle over at George Mason gets a nice quote:

“No technology trend in fitness has gotten more media attention than cognition training,” said Andrew Carle, a George Mason University professor who studies brain-training products. “What’s driving it is the jump we are seeing in Alzheimer’s, which is an age-related disease.”

References:
Walker, L. (2007, September 12). Keep your brain power up. The Washington Post, pp. HE09. [Online]. Retrieved September 22, 2007 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2007/09/10/AR2007091001879.html

Alice Founder Delivers Last Speech

I’ve written about the educational programming language Alice in previous articles and posts, starting here. Jeff Zaslow, the “Moving On” columnist for the The Wall Street Journal reported this week on Randy Pauch over at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Pauch is a founding father of Alice, and he recently delivered his “final speech.”

Dr. Pauch has pancreatic cancer, and is expected to live only a few months. The speech was recorded so that his sons, ages five, two, and one, can see and hear the speech when they grow older.

The significance of Dr. Pauch’s work with Alice was best summed up in this quote:

Considered one of the nation’s foremost teachers of videogame and virtual-reality technology, he helped develop “Alice,” a Carnegie Mellon software project that allows people to easily create 3-D animations. It had one million downloads in the past year, and usage is expected to soar.

Defying typical stereotypes, Dr. Pauch’s work in introducing the instructional side of video gaming was best summed up in this quote:

He talked of requiring his students to create videogames without sex and violence. “You’d be surprised how many 19-year-old boys run out of ideas when you take those possibilities away,” he said, but they all rose to the challenge.

This is a great article about a great professor.

References:
Zaslow, J. (2007, September 20). A beloved professor delivers the lecture of a lifetime. The Wall Street Journal, D1. [Online.] Available: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119024238402033039.html

 

Update:
Carnegie Mellon has the full video of Randy Pauch’s last speech online here.

DFC Intelligence Briefing on the Videogame Marketplace

DFC Intelligence, a California company offering market research, has released a nice set of reports detailing information regarding the video game industry. The reports are aimed at corporate consumers, and consequently are not cheap with subscription prices hovering around $3,000/year.

The site eMarketer.com sums things up nicely in an article here. According to DFC, video games and interactive entertainment are expected to grow from worldwide revenues of $33 billion last year to $47 billion in ’09, then $54 billion in ’11.

References:
eMarketer.com (2007, September 20). Video game market to set new high score. [Online.] Available: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1005393

Parents Rejoice: Video Games Don’t Hurt GPAs Much

Todd Stinebrickner over at Western Ontario, and Ralph Stinebrickner over at Berea College (a son & father team), wrote a paper based on the effects studying (or lack thereof) had on grade point averages. The study was based on time-use diaries that volunteer college students kept for the researchers. Data was collected in 2000 and 2001. A total of 210 subjects participated.

The media has trumpeted the most salacious findings in the study: video game use (mainly consoles, it appears from media coverage) that interfered with study time led to slightly lower grades. USA Today/Yahoo News reported the story here; Wired reported the story here. But, parents of college students need not fret. The effect was not too bad. GPAs of freshmen who were gamers showed a decrease by .241 points.

Alas, the full paper is a $5 download, unless you are a working journalist or in a developing country, in which case it’s free. All others can read the abstract here.

References:
Arendt, S. (2007, September 19). Study: Roomies with videogames lower college students’ GPAs. [Online.] Available: http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/09/study-roomies-w.html

Naseef, K. (2007, September 19). Video games can shoot holes in GPA. USA Today. [Online.] Available: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070919/
tc_usatoday/videogamescanshootholesingpa

Stinebrickner, T. R., & Stinebricker, R. (2007, August). The causal effect of studying on academic performance. [NBER working paper no. 13341.] Cambridge, Massachusetts: National Bureau of Economic Research.