Programming, Game Design and the Media Arts

Andrew Burn

London Knowledge Lab

Institute of Education, University of London

http://www.magicalprojects.co.uk

•10 years of R&D•Productive partnerships with Immersive Education, The Globe, and the British Library•Extensive use in schools in the UK and internationally•Research into media education, Shakespeare and games, and programming in schools

Manovich’s Two Cultures

BABBAGE’S ANALYTICAL ENGINE

DAGUERRE’S DAGUERROTYPE

THE MULTIMEDIA COMPUTERACORN’S ARCHIMEDES

C P Snow’s Two Cultures (1959):

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

GAME DESIGN AND MISSIONMAKER: MEDIA ARTS MEETS PROGRAMMING?•Rapid design of 3-D games•New understandings of narrative and representation•Ludic rules and economies•Game Grammar –

conditionality

PLAYFUL SHAKESPEARE: games, drama and literature in education

AHRC Digital Transformations programme

THE SCRIPTING LANGUAGE

NEW FUNCTIONS OF THE SOFTWARE: ECONOMIES

Making the Macbeth game:

Blood

Metaphors

Economies

Cultural crossover

IN DEVELOPMENT: MISSIONMAKER CORE

The upcoming MissionMaker Core has a new scripting language that has been designed to be both powerful and easy to use.“Users can easily create “Conditions” and “Actions” by selecting the context sensitive properties of an object in sequence.Here for example we see the condition“IF Door, Is Clicked”

Then the Action“Door, Open, True”This rule will open the Door 1 if the player clicks it.

The new rules system also allows us to create multiple conditions and conforms to the new computing curriculum requirement of using Boolean logic, AND, OR and NOT operators. “IF Door, Is Clicked”

AND “Player, Health < 100”

OR “Player, Health > 100”

Then the Action“Door 1, Open, True”

Now the door will open if the player has less than 100 health AND clicks the door. OR it will open automatically if the player has over 100 health.

SO:

Teach programming, yesBut as a way of thinking about, representing and

acting on the worldAnd in tandem with the arts – STEAM, Fusion, cross-

curricular programmes, AND MEDIA EDUCATION – the pride of Europe, but undervalued in UK education policy.

Look out for Coding & Creativity from LKL

http://www.magicalprojects.co.uk

www.darecollaborative.net