It has been a while since the last blog post,  sorry!

Many people will know that we have a set up an innovative project with the computer games art degree at Norwich University College of the Arts. In the current academic year we have decided to build on the success of the first year and run a series of student workshops.

In November we held the first workshop called building a game in a day. We are currently developing a series of lone worker protection courses and decided to use a real-life brief with the students. They had to develop the story, narrative, learning objectives and decide upon the audience for their resource before spending the afternoon building a sample module.

At the end of the day each of the student groups has to present their finished game module and also their documentation. I was hugely impressed with the manner in which the students took to the challenge. Some of the game ideas and concepts that were presented were excellent and could easily be used in a commercial project.

To support the students I enlisted the help of Sam, George and Shaun (last year’s work placement students) who provided expert software and also offered a critical eye. Anthony and I provided commercial and project management advice and an insight into what potential clients might be looking for.

The workshop was a great success with 10 excellent game modules being developed, with one group producing 4 example games. From my perspective it was interesting to see how the games design students pushed the software and also came up with new concepts and ideas that we might not have thought of. We are continuing to use computer games designers on our elearning projects and this workshop only helped to re-inforce my belief that they make an excellent addition to our team.

It was interesting to view the different creative processes that each of the groups had. We provided some rough timings and ideas but it was largely left to the students to organise themselves and their time. It was interesting to see how they all started to sketch out design ideas and process flow maps for how the game might work. It is clear to me that game design and instructional design share many principles and once we had introduced the students to the concept of learning objectives they were able to incorporate them into their design.

In December I was able to share my thoughts on the workshop with members of the Association of Learning Technology and the eLearning network during a webinar on serious games that I was presenting.

For more information on the workshop you can read an article that was featured in the Norwich evening news.

Scott

May 13th 2009 - Norwich

We are going to be holding the next e-learning forum event on Games Based Learning. After posting on the blog about our PSP trials and other games based development we decided it would be a good idea to make it the next topic for the e-learning forum.

The response to the event has been really positive, we are planning to have a number of speakers over a few hours making it a little longer than normall events. We’ll have a games area where people will be able to try all types of consoles and devices.  We have some speakers in mind but are interested in talking to anyone who might have something interesting to talk about during the event.

The event will be free and we will be hoping to see some new faces amongst the regular people who attend. I’ve been talking to lots of businesses and educators about games based learning and the possibilities. Last week the Games Based Learning conference (Tom Watson Speech) took place and futurelab have announced the are running a research project on games and learning. As some readers might know we have a link with the NUCA Computer Games Degree and it is interesting to see how games design, learning and learning technologies are becoming ever closer.

Last week I saw a superb session by Russell Prue on how games are being used in the Classroom. You can take a look at some of the resources http://www.andertontiger.com/norfolk/

We have just finalised our link up with the Computer Games Degree at NUCA. We have agreed to take a student from the second year for a semester at a time. Sam is our first lucky student! The aim of the link is to provide the students with an insight into e-learning and learning technology and they help us to develop more games based learning within our own projects.

I’ve been interested in games development for sometime and have posted articles in the blog and visited several courses so its great to get the link up sorted. I view the link as a two-way process as I think there is a great deal that the students can teach us about Games Design.

As e-learning developers we are always looking for ways to improve and use new technology and innovations. This link up should allow us to do this. We’ve been talking to Caspian about using their new development tool and the students were very excited about the possibilities of working with the tool.

…finally….during the interview process we asked the students what their favourite game was and why? I can’t afford to buy all of the games that they mentioned but we are going to look out for monster hunter which is something of a classic in Japan!

After talking to the team at Norwich University College of the Arts we are close to setting up a link with the Games Degree. I’ve been interested in Games Design and how the skills of games developers might transfer to e-learning for some time. I’ll have more news about what we are planning in the next few weeks but the RP team and NUCA are excited about the link up. Thanks to Rod Green over at NUCA for helping to get everything set up!

More news on this soon….