Presentation - Chalkboard

Playful Cleverness Revisited:
open-source game development as a method for teaching software engineering

Mart Laanpere
Centre for Educational Technology, Tallinn UniversityKaido KikkasInstitute of Informatics, Tallinn UniversityEstonian Information Technology College

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

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

The roots

MIT Tech Model Railroad Club 1946

The Signals & Power Subcommittee

First computer science classes in 1959 (TX-0), PDP-1 in 1961, Project MAC in 1963

MIT AI Lab in 1970

Formation of the culture

For more info: Hackers by Steven Levy

Not business as usual

Computer science ~ rocket science

Too few people to form a market

Military undertones

Software was machine-specific

Hackers kept apart from managers

=> Playful Cleverness: original display of creativity unhindered by market motives

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

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

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

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

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

A screenshot

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]

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you!

Further contact:Kaido Kikkaskaido.kikkas@kakupesa.net Skype: kakuonuServer@home: http://www.kakupesa.net

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