Playful Cleverness Revisited: Open-Source Game Development as a Method for Teaching Software Development

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A presentation given at the SENSE09 workshop in Kaiserslautern in March 3, 2009. The related paper can be found at http://www.kakupesa.net/kakk/docs/sense2009.pdf

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  • 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 [email protected]: kakuonu Server@home: http://www.kakupesa.net