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:

• • Survival

• • Social life

• • Entertainment

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

MIT AI Lab in 1970

Formation of the culture

For more info:Hackersby Steven Levy

5. Not business as usual

Computer science ~ rocket science

Too few people to form a market

Military undertones

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

Two major aspects

• 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)

• narrative/verbal (story)

• technical/logical (WML)

For comparison: How To Become A Hacker by Eric S. Raymond

15. The building process

Storyline ,events, scenarios

Main characters and related unit types

For each scenario

• Design (objectives, events)

• Map design (terrain ,starting points)

• Units and recruitment scheme

• Coding

Coding the campaign summary

Testing and balancing

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 kaido.kikkas@kakupesa.netSkype: kakuonu Server@home: http://www.kakupesa.net