- 1. Playful Cleverness Revisited:open-source game development as
a method for teaching software engineering Mart Laanpere Centre for
Educational Technology, Tallinn University Kaido Kikkas Institute
of Informatics, Tallinn University Estonian Information Technology
College
2. The A-Ha! Experience
- In that instant, I as a Christian thought I could feel
something of the satisfaction that God must have felt when He
created the world - Tom Pittman at MIT after successfully running a
computer program; around 1975
- IT WORKS!!! :) Our campaign really works! Well, its not an
extremely huge piece of coding-art, but at least its playable.
Feels funny to play it :) I was quite sure it would never reach
this point.. If there was more time it would be nice to develop it
further - Sonja Merisalo at TLU after completing a campaign for
Battle for Wesnoth; Dec 2006
3. Playful Cleverness
- A characteristic of the hacker culture (in its original
sense)
-
- Doing serious work in a not-so-serious manner
-
- Originality and creativity dominate over routine
-
- A manifestation of the Linus' Law on motivation:
4. The roots
- MIT Tech Model Railroad Club 1946
- The Signals & Power Subcommittee
- First computer science classes in 1959 (TX-0), PDP-1in 1961,
Project MAC in 1963
- For more info:Hackersby Steven Levy
5. Not business as usual
- Computer science ~ rocket science
- Too few people to form a market
- Software was machine-specific
- Hackers keptapartfrom managers
- => Playful Cleverness: original display of creativity
unhindered by market motives
6. Decline and return
- 80s: business growth, microcomputers, software as a proprietary
product
- 1984: Richard M. Stallman founded the FSF
- 1991: Linus Torvalds created Linux
- 90s: Internet, Linux, LAMP, KDE, GNOME....
- 2000s: The hackers have returned
7. The hacker way
-
- Open Source: public development, flexible and unhindered
participation, no external burden
-
- Playful Cleverness: informal management, ha-ha, only serious!,
grassroot innovation
- Technology and management both are important
8. Case Study: the courses
- Two courses at Tallinn University
-
- Open Source Management : autumn 2007, Master level, 6 students
with backgrounds in education and media
-
- Methods and Practices of Free Software : spring 2008, Bachelor
level, 23 students with background in IT (incl. software
development)
- Both courses used teams of 3-5 people
9. Case Study: the tools
- Environment: Trac (wiki, ticket-based workflow),
Subversion
- Target: The Battle for Wesnoth
- Each team had to build a mini-campaign for the game, using
web-based teamwork
10. The Battle for Wesnoth
- One of the best free/open-source games
- Turn-based strategy (single or multiplayer), lots of different
units, day/night cycle,XML-like markup language, central server for
campaigns, large active community
11. A screenshot 12. A snippet of WML
[event]name=prestart[objectives]side=1[objective]description= _
"Resist until the end of the turns.
condition=win[/objective][objective]description= _ "Death of
Ryan"condition=lose[/objective][/objectives][/event] 13. Why
Wesnoth?
- Initially, for the OSM course,
-
- it matched better the diverse background of the
participants
-
- it allowed for a wider range of different sub-tasks
-
- it sparked the hacker-ish innovative creativity
- Yet it worked with the IT people as well
14. What does it teach?
- Developing a scenario for the BfW requires elements from three
different areas:
-
- artistic/visual (units, maps, screens etc)
- For comparison: How To Become A Hacker by Eric S. Raymond
15. The building process
- Storyline ,events, scenarios
- Main characters and related unit types
-
- Design (objectives, events)
-
- Map design (terrain ,starting points)
-
- Units and recruitment scheme
- Coding the campaign summary
16. The results
- Well-received by the diverse group
- Lots of creative solutions (including some non-standard
campaigns)
- Tools were adequate, but more Web 2.0 could help in a full
distance setting
- The Playful Cleverness was grasped well
- The game approach helps non-tech students
17. Ideas for the future
- Test the same approach on other IT and media courses
- Try other free/open-source games (also from different
genres)
- Combine the experience with social software, 3D virtual worlds
(OpenSim, SL) and other distributed environments
18. Thank you! Further contact: Kaido Kikkas
[email protected]: kakuonu Server@home:
http://www.kakupesa.net