voyeurism

EcoRangers® at [email protected] 2004

The Education Technology Division of Singapore's Ministry of Education invited Jason and I to set up a booth at this year's [email protected] event, which was held at the Singapore Science Centre. The Guest-of-Honour was the Second Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education - LG (NS) Lim Chuan Poh. it was a thrill to have him take the time to stop by our booth for a few minutes :-)

This year's is the fifth in a series - previous events were [email protected] 2000, [email protected] 2001, [email protected] 2002, and most recently [email protected] 2003. The objectives of the series are to bring learning outside the classroom, to encourage pupils to link what they observe during the learning experience to what they have learnt in class, and to promote the use of IT in facilitating pupils' learning.

Our booth received many visitors from primary and secondary schools. Rongwei and Tungsiang (pictured below at the booth) were there too, and we all had a good time :-)

Technorati Tags: EcoRangers®, games, [email protected]

thinking caps

more than a month after its debut, EcoRangers® continues to make waves in the mass media :-)

this time, the Computer Times ran nearly a full-page spread on the game, from the point of view of the twenty Sec Three students from Fuchun Secondary who have been the first to play it.

there's also a great pic of Foo Tung Siang and Sim Rong Wei playing the game :-)

"put some thought into it" - the article is headlined.

i couldn't agree more :-)

Technorati Tags: EcoRangers®, games

thirty minutes

jason and i demo-ed EcoRangers® to john yesterday - john explored the environment and posted a couple of messages for the entire thirty-minute duration of the game.

three suggestions he made were to give players the map-overview of the entire gamespace at the start of play; to increase nugget density (whereupon i suggested that we some nuggets occur more than once, and in random locations); and to have food available in all areas of the gamespace.

this afternoon the SAC field activity will represent the eighth and final SAC topic being fieldtested - things should go smoothly, as they have in the previous seven :-)

by the way, if you're wondering how it all went, john's character died of starvation :-P

Technorati Tags: EcoRangers®

hot off the press

By the grace of God, EcoRangers® was featured in the national press today :-)

a colour feature was carried in the largest Chinese-language daily - the Lianhe Zaobao. it was written by Martin Wang Jianbo, and featured screenshots of the game :-)

a promotional panel also appeared in the largest circulation English daily - the Straits Times. it read "do educational mobile games like EcoRangers® open up a whole new world of learning?"

i certainly hope so :-)

Technorati Tags: EcoRangers®, games

debut

yeah :-)

launched EcoRangers® at the AGM / Annual Seminar of the Geography Teachers' Association today :-)

about 200 teachers attended the launch at the Meritus Mandarin hotel.

we gave away about 40 copies of the demo version of the world's first multiplayer handheld game designed specifically for education (we could only burn that number of copies in time).

EcoRangers® is unique in many ways, not least because it is one of the few games (and certainly the only handheld one) in which players 'win' by collaborating with, and not competing against, each other.

EcoRangers® has been five-and-a-half months in the making, and represents a dream come true, in so many ways :-)

Technorati Tags: EcoRangers®, education, games, technology

blown away

had my first preview of the software which Jason has been working on all these past months.

we're going to launch it at the AGM / Annual Seminar of the Geography Teachers' Association of Singapore this coming Saturday :-)

i know i should have expected as much, but i was still blown away this first time i played with the game. and so was Richard, who's the lawyer we have engaged to oversee the intellectual property of the software (won't reveal the name to you yet :-) )

i would also like to thank Yen Ling, who's another lawyer. she helped us with the licence agreement for the demo copies we're going to distribute this Saturday.

meanwhile, the pre-tests are over for Fuchun, and we've just started the orienteering tasks.

i'm happy to say that the geography pupils of 3E1/E2 are doing very well in the orienteering tasks so far. i'm also relieved that my final two routes - Jurong East and Pasir Panjang - have proved workable (yet to try the SAC at these two locales, though - that will be next month).

today, Mr Zainudin (the teacher-in-charge at Fuchun) told me that some of the pupils had enjoyed the orienteering tasks so much that they had expressed the wish to go for a second round :-)

meeting jason #4

had a meeting with developer Jason today.

we firmed up still further the plans for the ngage game (for the pre- and post-tests).

i've also started the pre-tests with my pilot school, and so far things have been going largely well (with the exception of the accidental erasure of all the recorded video from the first day's session :-P )

i've designed a simple FileMaker database into which i'm putting my data. so far i've defined just under eighty discrete fields of entry, but i expect that number to rise :-P

blowing the horn

as promised, here's an update on food and transport.

collected the vouchers from Stephanie Loh of McDonald's this morning :-)

also collected the laminated maps for the pre- / post-tests, part two of the main intervention, and the peer critique. three different types of maps in various sizes, for these three types of activities :-P

the transport will be provided by Anne Chua, who is also trying to help me source some chaperones.

i would like to welcome Alexius Yeo as a chaperone. Like Kwangsheng, he is awaiting enlistment, and will be able to help with the Yishun Town Sec study.

on Monday, i hope to collect the SIM cards from Starhub.

okie, i've saved the best for last:

congratulations to developer Jason for winning a Sony Ericsson T610 for himself in the Wireless Java Jam competition, in the category 'Best User Interface' :-)

the competition is organised by the Java Wireless Competency Centre. here's the report from 'The New Paper'.

to quote the article "the most impressive effort had to come from Jason Wang... Jason is the only multimedia student among the winners - the others are all IT students".

well done, my friend :-)

hardware and heartware

quite a lot has happened recently.

last week i sent out the call for quotations for the phones. yesterday, i retrieved the quotations, and made my purchase.

i bought 5 NGages and 3 Nokia 6600 from MacShop at Funan.

i decided to use the 6600 instead of the P900 for the study because of cost.

i also bought some 64MB multimedia cards for the phones.

i collected the phones today, and will be giving Jason his NGage later tonight, at a department barbeque.

so it will be the first time John meets Jason :-)

also had my third meeting with my supervisor today. basically we discussed the rationale for using NGage, and agreed that it need not be used for the post-test, just as a pre-test, in order to establish a baseline. this is because the NGage task is so similar to the actual exploration task.

i also received feedback on the three chapters which i have submitted so far. standardise the tense and write in a less jingoistic fashion; also change 'pupils' to 'students', and use 'Grade 9' instead of 'Sec Three' :-P

we also talked about manpower requirements - whether to get an RA or simply a chaperone.

i shared with them that i will be firming up plans with the schools next month (once the nationwide exams are over), also i have to map out the neighbourhoods then.

rushing off to the barbeque now :-P

En garde! :-P

had a meeting with Jason yesterday.

he called the meeting because he felt that his Terms of Reference (which need to be submitted imminently) were still not very well sorted.

one of the things he suggested was for him to write what he termed a 'Multimedia Management System', which would essentially facilitate easy sorting on my part, of the various messages which would be accumulated over time. i thought this was a good idea, if it could indeed be carried out. We were concerned about the tight time frame (considering that i would like to finish beta testing by January), until we realised that this Management System need not be put in place till later in 2004. this meant that Jason could concentrate on developing the other applications first.

another insight i had recently was that since the p800 (and now the p900) both have browsers which can read html, there is really no need for him to code in wml if he does not wish to.

but the most exciting idea of yesterday was this:

we were idly exploring ideas on how to make the game task more challenging, in terms of its programming. i concede that simple quizzes are relatively easy to program. so i casually asked him if there were such things as multi-player games for the phone. in reply, he said, half in jest i suspect, "not unless we use N-Gage".

it did not take me long to realise that this was actually a very good idea.

the Nokia N-Gage is the first phone to truly support multi-player collaborative interaction in real-time. given especially the emphasis that my boss and many of my colleagues place a premium on technologies which support collaborative learning, and the fact that if we could pull this off, it would be quite a feather in Jason's cap.

i won't elaborate further at this point of time, in order to be fair to Jason and his intellectual property. suffice to say that the N-Gage will not replace the Sony Ericssons, as the former will be used only in the pre- and post-tests, whereas the latter will continue to be used (by dint of their superior imaging / recording / playback and storage capabilities) during the actual intervention in the field. in this way, we maximimally tap the affordances of each piece of technology.

:-)