UnrealEd for EducationPaula Wellings

Gaming + education

• Motivation: “Fun”• New Literacy movement• Personalized learning• Informal experiences that prepare

people for learning• First person experiences of systems • Visual acuity• Spatial Cognition

Communities engaged in using gaming models for educationDiGRA: Digital Games Research Association, Europe• academics and practitioners whose work focuses on digital games and associated activities• in cooperation with the International Game Developers Association, DiGRA is working to bridge the gap between

academic game researchers and game developers through a monthly column entitled “Ivory Tower” which explicitly raises fundamental game research issues to the broader game development community

• DiGRA has been operational as a group since the beginning of 2003, and in this time under 100 posts have been made to its forum area. Primary community activities appear to take place at conferences. (http://www.digra.org )

Room 130, Associated with the University of Wisconsin at Madison• interdisciplinary research group devoted to digital games, learning, and literacy. • lead by Jim Gee and Kurt Squire, the group is associated with the New Literacy movement of the London Group• key areas of research include The Genesis of Online Gaming Culture, The Discourse of Massively Multiplayer Online

Gaming, and Innovating Qualitative Methods for Digital Domains. • provides access to a listing of academic papers, but does not include community features

The Digital Media Collaboratory, IC2 Institute at the University of Texas• hosts classes, workshops, and conferences on gaming for both game developers and academics• recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to research educational and commercial merits of a

science-based video game for middle school students. • hosting a recurring Game Design and Development competition for high-school students.• hosts a number of wiki associated with its conferences and initiatives, visible wiki has little action

The Education Arcade, 2 years old, MIT• purpose to determine whether high quality educational games could be made and used effectively in the classroom. • through a Microsoft iCampus initiative, has developed a number of game prototypes and worked with teachers and

students at MIT and local high schools to determine their effectiveness. • majority of extended community activity centers around its conference gatherings which draw key players in the

learning-gaming area• has standard community forum features, there are few postings, under 100, and the most members online at the same

time occurred on October 2nd, 2003 when 4 members were on the site at the same time.

Opportunity: Spatial Cognition

META-ANALYSIS FINDS DECREASE IN SEX DIFFERENCES

(Voyer et. al, 1995)

TETRIS TRANSFER (Sims, V. K. & Mayer, R. E. ,2002).

DISPLAY SIZE (Czerwinski et. al, 2002)

SPATIAL EXPERIENCE IS RELATED TO GOOD SPATIAL TEST PERFORMANCE. PRIOR PARTICIPATION IN SPATIAL ACTIVITIES (SPORTS, GAMES, REAL LIFE SETTINGS) IS CORRELATED WITH HIGHER SPATIAL TEST SCORES (Baenninger & Newcombe, 1989). [Sjölinder, 1998]

INSTRUCTION CAN IMPROVE SPATIAL REASONING (Agogino, Hsi, 1995)

NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE INDICATING THAT ACTION INFLUENCES SPATIAL PERCEPTION (Humphreys, 2004)

The largest sex difference in favour of males are found on measures of mental rotation and smaller difference are found on measures of spatial perception.

Interaction in computer virtual environments: education--gaming

What is Unreal?

What is the Unreal Engine?

What is the Unreal Engine?

Unreal Enginekey features

Physics: The Karma 1.2 rigid body physics engine allows for complex physics simulations encompassing between actors, environments, and objects. The sophistication of the engine enables the construction and exploration of a plethora of real and simulated physical phenomena.

Lighting: Multiple light types are supported: directional, point lights, and spot lights. Lights can be any colour and brightness, and dynamic lighting and shadowing effects can be simulated. These features enable the ability for designers and players to interact with the qualities of light in a simulated environment.

Textures: Detail textures within the engine allow for extremely close-up details to surfaces, such as fine wood grain, pock marks on brick surfaces, or scoring to metal. It has been found that there are sex differences in the way that people navigate through space. Females are more likely to utilize landmarks in the environment. It is possible that in the past, lack of texture variation within 3D environments has made navigation more difficult for landmark-based navigators. The ability of the engine to display detailed textures may improve way finding experiences within virtual spaces.

Artificial Intelligence: AI properties are exposed to level designers for setting up patrol routes, individual creature moods and more. The ability to manipulate the behavior of actors within a system can be appealing to a designers sense of control, which may be especially compelling to children. Additionally, the use of AI actors within a world can enable the exploration of participatory simulations within virtual worlds.

Audio: The engine provides detailed control over the auditory experience through the support of 3D spatialization, attenuation, pitch and Doppler shifting. A number of researchers who study girls and gaming have suggested that providing girls creative opportunities related to sound may increase their interest in technology. (Brunner, C. et al. 19**)

Networking: Since it’s inception, the Unreal Engine has been developed for networked play. The engine supports gamers traveling between Unreal servers much like browsing web pages, with teleporters providing links between servers. It also supports automatic downloading of new content (levels, textures, sound, models, scripts) while browsing Unreal servers. (UDN) For supporting classroom experiences and other online community activities, it is of value to be able to seamlessly migrate between multiple user created worlds and environments.

UnrealEd Community

The UnrealEd community occupies a sophisticated network of websites where participants

…

UnrealEd Community: make things to share with the community, such as levels, mods, meshes, and animations

UnrealEd Community: download and play maps created by community members and feedback

UnrealEd Community: write tutorials for other members

UnrealEd Community: contribute to community knowledge via forums, wiki and blogs

UnrealEd Community: band together to become development teams

UnrealEd Community:access resources with different levels of commitment to site

UnrealEd Community: have a long term relationships with sites

UnrealEd Community:interact with Unreal Engine developers

UnrealEd Community:get discovered and hired by professional game developers

UnrealEngine2Runtime

Little demo

Use Restrictions

Use Restrictions. We want you to enjoy our products for years to come, and we want to be able to continue to release awesome stuff, so you need to be aware that there are some things you cannot do with the Runtime Software. The Runtime Software contains copyrighted material, trade secrets and other proprietary material. You may not decompile, modify, reverse engineer, prepare derivative works based on the Runtime Software, or disassemble the Runtime Software. You may not rent, sell, lease, barter, or sublicense the Runtime Software. You may not delete the copyright notices or any other proprietary legends on the original copy of the Runtime Software. You may not offer the Runtime Software on a pay-per-play basis or otherwise commercially exploit the Runtime Software or use the Runtime Software for any commercial purpose. You may, however, use the Runtime Software for non-commercial and educational purposes. You may not ship or export the Runtime Software to any country that would be in violation of the U.S. Export Administration Act (or any other law governing such matters) and you will not utilize and will not authorize anyone to utilize the Runtime Software in violation of any applicable law. The Runtime Software may not be downloaded or otherwise exported into (or to a national or resident of) any country to which the U.S. has embargoed goods or to anyone or into any country who/which are prohibited by applicable law, from receiving it. YOU MAY NOT USE THE RUNTIME SOFTWARE TO DEVELOP GAMES FOR RELEASE VIA ANY MEANS TO ANY FORM OF END-USER. YES, I KNOW THIS SOUNDS NASTY BUT LET'S FACE IT, EPIC'S PRIMARY MEANS OF INCOME COMES FROM GAME SALES AND ENGINE LICENSING. WE WOULD BE SHOOTING OURSELVES IN THE FOOT IF WE ALLOWED AN ENGINE WE GAVE AWAY FOR FREE TO TRAMPLE OUR PRIMARY MEANS OF INCOME. SORRY, BUT IF YOU WANT TO DEVELOP AND RELEASE A GAME PLEASE DEVELOP IT AS A MOD FOR ONE OF OUR EXISTING RETAIL GAME PRODUCTS OR CONTACT US REGARDING A PROPER ENGINE LICENSE. (More information on UnrealEngine2 licensing can be found at: http://udn.epicgames.com/pub/Engine/WebHome/.) THANKS FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORT.

Challenges to a new Unreal OLCCulture

• existing tutorials contain characters and activities such as death match

• existing tutorials generally address the interests and needs of player designers

• no financial incentive for development work—business model?

• no guiding examples of the future use of Unreal

• multidisciplinary sophistication required to develop educationally meaningful interactions within the game space—how to get beyond edu-tainment in order to leverage the capacities of both humans and technologies

Technology

• Runtime is currently harder to use than the commercial Unreal Engines

• the separation of Runtime and the commercial engine means that existing weapons and maps cannot be imported (at least not easily or legally)

• no direct support from Unreal without $$

• Engine continues to evolve

Resources

• existing tutorials address three different visions of the editor and engines

• many current resources are generated by non-professionals

• requires a multitude of skills to get it to where it needs to be, including programming skills, subject matter expertise related to k-12 education and spatial cognition, level design experience

My forum reply:Networking in the Runtime, while fully functional, isn't really easy to use. There are also a

few bugs which you'll need to correct before you can run a server.First, you'll need to update the packages.md5 file; it's using really old definitions. You only

technically need to do this on the server, but since you're supposed to make new standalone Runtime applications with your content (and not just tell people to download the Runtime, and then install your content separately), you should probably include it with those.

Second, you'll need to fix player spawning; it's totally broken. If you connect to the UDN Runtime demo servers (addresses are on UDN), you'll download a new package with an updated GameInfo and some other stuff; you can modify the code from that to do it.

Third, you'll need to account for telefrags in your player code; since the Runtime player can't die, it can get a little weird, with people freezing in place until they reconnect and such. This may be fixed in the code from #2, I don't remember.

Fourth, ambient sounds don't work in netplay. We haven't looked into it, so I don't know if they can be fixed with just UnrealScript.

Fifth, HTTP download redirection doesn't work. This is a known issue with this version of the engine, it's not our fault, but we didn't find out about it until after we shipped the Runtime.

You can just hit ` (tilde) to drop down the console, and type in "open 127.0.0.1" or whatever IP or domain name the server is running on, and that will let you connect to a Runtime server. That's how you connect to the UDN Runtime demo servers, as described here:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Powered/UnrealEngine2Runtime22261903#ErrataFor easier networking support, I'd suggest looking at how the UT2003/4 menus do the

networking menus, and writing up some nice new code using the menuing tutorials on UDN, and contributing it back to the community. :)

Additionally, the male and female demo models on UDN are available for download, and there's Runtime packages that include them. Try checking out:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Technical/MyFirstPawnYou can also search UDN Technical for "MyFirst" to get other related documents.

Is there a mission critical activity for a community to form around?One possible mission is to build a

community around the Runtime Engine in order to create tools, tutorials, examples and simulations to support the exploration of spatial cognition and “physical phenomina” by students, teachers and researchers…

Potential Participants

• committed to interactions within the “physical” virtual environment

• potentially math and science oriented• will to get hands dirty—have time to get hands dirty• interested in how UnrealEd could be used in schools• interested in complex instruction• not afraid of technology and dealing with

unpredictable software• doesn’t flinch when someone says “frag fest”• mindful to the cross-cultural implications of going

from game world to girl world—attentive to the needs of all students in designing materials and examples

• Subject matter expertise

Potential Activities

• improving Runtime for multi-player use• creating resources to support student use

of UnrealEd as players, designers, and programmers

• creating worlds that can be easily utilized by teachers and students

• building the resources—examples, tutorials, worlds, that would make Runtime usable in the classroom, both as a game development tools for students and as an environment to construct “embodied” simulations

Tools a community might need• easy to use remote screen sharing• persistent presence• collaborative tutorial library with areas identified to

expand upon by participants shared object/model/code/level library

• discussion board• large goals broken down into actionable activities for

members• weekly/monthly challenges like Math Forum• access to content area resources• ability to create work and play teams and schedule

meetings• calendar• game capture plus diver type tool to enable people to

discuss their levels asynchronously