Let the games begin!

Last week we started the game-play portion of my Iberian History and Culture Class. See posts below for more information about the class. I have to be honest, I was worried for weeks about how this would go. I wasn't sure if the students would really get into it, if they would think it is dumb, or if they would reject the idea flat out. It turns out that while there are still things to be worked out, I AM MORE CONVINCED NOW THAN EVER THAT THIS IS A VALUABLE WAY TO CONDUCT CLASS. I have never seen students more consistently engaged, working hard, and learning than I have in this class. The sheer quantity of work is pretty amazing. Each student has read hundreds if not thousands of pages, and written dozens more. They are also not just speaking in Spanish, but they are conversing, solving problems, trash-talking, making jokes, and even singing songs! The video below is actually an embedded playlist, so you can see all of the videos I've taken over the past couple of days. Below that, I've put a gallery of pictures to give you an idea of the creative scope of this project -- including the impressive array of maps students have created for the game. As one of my colleagues said: These students are dialed in!

The Best Dr. Who Primer

I often make references to Dr. Who in class, and I have been pleasantly surprised to find that many of my students here at SUU are fans as well. It is a fantastic show, but even the re-boot has been going on now for some time and it can be difficult for people to know when and how to jump into the "Who-niverse."

Enter Jason Sneell. He has a great podcast called The Incomparable described as:

A weekly dive into geeky media we love, including movies, books, TV, comics, and more. Jason Snell talks with a rotating panel of regular guests including John Siracusa, Dan Moren, Steve Lutz, Serenity Caldwell, Scott McNulty, and Glenn Fleishman. Winner of the 2012 Parsec Award for best fan podcast!

This is without doubt one of the best podcasts on the internet, and they occasionally will dedicate an episode to Dr. Who. What's more, Jason recently posted "How to Watch 'Dr. Who'" on his blog, and I just want to add that I completely agree with his analysis of the series and his recommendations of how and where to start watching.

I would perhaps just add that among my favorite episodes are Blink, Amy's Choice, A Good Man Goes to War, and the 50th Anniversary The Day of the Doctor.

So do any of you watch Dr. Who? What are your favorite episodes?

Iberian History and Culture: Days 8-11

The past couple of weeks have been very productive in my Iberian History and Culture class. Students have now worked in groups of time period, race, class, and now religion. It has been very exciting to see them move in the liminal space between research and imagination to create some really great stuff.

Today was a really important day, and I believe that at the end of the semester when I look back and decide if this class was a success or a failure, I will be able to point to this day as a crucial turning point.

I have been stressing for the past several weeks about the game-play aspect of this class. We are getting fairly close to winding down the game creation part, but I’ve had a hard time envisioning what the game play part would look like. On the first day of class I asked how many students were familiar with Dungeons & Dragons and nobody raised their hand. Then the other day in class I realized that while many of my students are not D&D players, there are several who are gamers and are familiar with other RPGs.

So today I explained to them a little bit of the background that I have created, based largely on ideas presented in the excellent short story “El día que hicimos la transición” by Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero.

I told students that in some distant future humans would discover the secrets of time travel. They would also discover the ability to create a “Time Bubble” that exists outside of time but can look out and observe the flow of time. These people are called Time Defenders and their job is to maintain the timeline of history. There are others called Time Terrorists who are motivated only by a spirit of chaos. They want to create havoc by tampering with the timeline in order to create the greatest historical impact possible. Because we are working with four different time periods, I want to have the terrorists focus on those four different years and have my students try to stop them. (Does any of this make sense?)

When one Time Defender dies, the other members of their crew simply goes back along the timeline to another point and gets a person that they feel best replaces the one who was lost.

So in class I proposed my dilemma to the students: how are we supposed to run an RPG with 30 students in the class and make sure everyone participates. How am I supposed to come up with four different fleshed-out scenarios when I’m not really familiar with RPGs as it is?

I told the students that I know that some of them are capable of helping me to create these missions/scenarios, but that I really can’t see what it is going to look like. Then one student raised his hand and said: What if you had a different student in charge of each mission, you put four or five students on a team and they went through one mission and then teams rotated around to different scenarios?

The students who had any idea of what we were talking about immediately latched onto the idea and I could tell they were excited about it. So that is what we are going to do.

Eight students immediately volunteered to be “Dungeon Masters” or Leaders of Time Terrorist cells. These are students who are very familiar with RPGs. They are divided into teams of two and each team is in charge of creating the Terrorist Scenario or Mission (depending on how you look at it) for each of the four periods on which we are focusing in class. I pulled these eight into the hallway and stressed to them the importance of what they had volunteered to do. They will be doing a ton of research over the next couple of weeks to create not just scenarios, but to create a simple set of rules to govern gameplay based on the core rulebook we have been developing. When we start the gameplay these students will be running four different scenarios at the same time in class. I will be wandering around the room observing, answering questions, etc.

I think the idea is genius. I’m so proud of my students for coming up with it, but I have to admit that part of me is terrified at the idea because I have given up a HUGE amount of control over the class. This is a big risk, but I think it will pay off.

After I left my 8 Cell Leaders to discuss their strategy, I went back into the classroom to make sure that everyone else was OK. I told them that it is totally normal for them to feel overwhelmed at this point and that for now they just need to keep reading and developing their characters. The rest will make sense as we go along. I said. “I need to reach into the freak-out zone where you now are and pull you back into the learning zone. Everything is going to be OK.”

They looked convinced.

So that’s where things stand right now. It’s going to be a crazy next few weeks.

Timelines -- Iberian History and Culture Days 5-7

I haven't written much over the past week or so. Things in the class have been going well. Nearly all of the Google Drive issues have been solved, although some continue to linger. The next time I teach this class I'm going to take more control over the creation of the shared documents. I think that will help.

I'm going to be honest here. I have always wished I had a better grasp of Iberian history. I see this class as a great opportunity to do better. I'm a very visual learner, and I have always wanted a visual timeline of Iberian history -- perhaps cross-referenced with other important historical moments. I'm sure I could find something else out there, but I learn a lot when I make my own aids. So I've been using OmniGraffle to make a chronology of Iberian history. I actually started making something like this last year when I taught SPAN 441 at BYU, but this semester it is going to be much bigger and better.

First I made a timeline of Iberian history beginning with the first appearance of Homo Heidelbergensis around 780,000 years ago. I wanted to give myself and my students an idea of the length of time different groups were in the Peninsula. I came up with the following diagram:

Iberian Pre-History

You can see that this doesn't leave me much room to dig into the details of recorded history, so I have started another timeline. The bottom is all mucked up the work that I did in that 441 class, but it will all come together soon. I am designing this on a grid in which each big square represents 10 years. I like it because it gives me enough granularity to see what is going on at different times. I don't know how big OmniGraffle will let me make this. I may have to divide it into different pieces.

Here is what I've got so far:

Iberian History

I like taking a few minutes at the beginning of class and showing my students new things that I've added to the timeline. They seem to like it as well.

I've added things up to when the Visigoths are going to enter the Peninsula. What do you think? Are there major events that I've missed so far?

I will be keeping updated versions of these timelines as PDFs on the class homepage here if you are interested in seeing how they progress.

And Then There Were None -- Iberian History and Culture: Day 4

Today was good, but a bit odd.

I started class with a brief presentation about Iberian pre-history from Homo heidelbergensis through the Iberians and Celts. I think that I was able to help the students understand how Iberian pre-history feeds the collective historical imagination of people like the Basques even today.

After that the students broke into their groups. Last Thursday I had the students in charge of describing the weapons from their time period break off into their own subgroup, and today they continued working together. They are building a D&D style spreadsheet with different weapons from different time periods and then ranking them based on weight, price, and relative lethality.

For much of class they were at the board hammering out some of these details.

I love having the students working in these groups because I think that they are really coming together to create something much bigger than the sum of their parts. All of the groups have done an impressive job of putting together a lot of information from a variety of different sources in just a week. Take a look at what one group has done here:

About halfway through class a couple of students, who have been tasked with a description of medicinal practices in the late 15th century, were asking me where they might go to broaden their research. I recommended that they read The Last Jew. They then asked me if they could go to the bookstore and pick it up. I said sure. Soon after, another pair of students asked if they could go to the computer lab to work on their contribution. Again, I said sure. Then more and more students started to leave. By the end of class, just a handful of students were left. Perhaps it is naive of me, but I believe that most of those who left did so because they were going to do research or write. I am OK with that, but it did feel odd. Maybe we will start class next time with a little discussion about this. It is something I had not anticipated, but I think I can work with it.

Finally, by now I believe that our Google Docs issues have been resolved. The next time I do this, I am going to make sure that we make a list of people's Google addresses and only deal with those. I am also going to lock down my templates so that students can't modify them. Hopefully that will help some.

... And Now My Mind Is Blown: Halo, Gobekli Tepe, and EPIC Humans

I was just reading in Reality is Broken about how games like Halo can inspire us to Awe because of their epic scale. She mentions how our previous theories about human evolution said that agriculture led to people settle down which gave them time to think about the gods, which led them to religion and the building of temples. But the discovery of Gobekli Tepe has led experts to now hypothesize that it was actually the desire to build something epic that led people to band together and sparked the neolithic period.

Warning: If you push play on this video, your mind may be blown.

Mine was.

Iberian History and Culture: Day 3

Class yesterday went very well again. It is a lot of fun to see the students working in their groups -- pointing out cool tidbits from history that they are finding in their research.

Google Drive continues to be a challenge for some of my students. I have maybe 7-10 who have not been able to share their mission log with me yet. With that small number, it may be easier to just make the copy on my end and share it with them. Ken Bain (author of What the Best College Teachers Do visited SUU at the beginning of last semester, and he mentioned that to be a great professor you have to be willing to start slow so that you can lay the necessary groundwork for your students. This feels like a bit slower start than I had anticipated in some ways, but I know that this foundation is critical.

This week, students continue to work on their time period descriptions. They are basically writing a kind of Wikipedia entry about the year in which their character was born. I think that some of the groups really have a good grasp on what they are doing.

I started class fielding questions as I usually do. Soon (perhaps not soon enough) I realized that we could spend the entire period just on that. So I broke them into groups and started to work with people individually as they had questions. If something came up that I wanted the whole class to hear, I would stop them, explain something, and then get back to work. This format seems to work better than being at the front. I think I am going to try to implement it more in all of my classes.

I made the Core Rulebook documents public so that all of the students could access and edit them easily. I think that it was good for them to see where they are going to be writing this stuff.

I think that the next step is for students to get in the habit of declaring their missions to me, completing those missions, and then reporting to me when they have completed their mission.

One recent modification to the class is that in order for a student to receive credit for completing a reading mission, they must write a brief response/summary of what they have read. This should be 150-300 words if they have read a book chapter, and 300-600 words if they have read a book. They will add a sheet to their mission log where they will write these responses.

Last night when class ended, I had a few emails from students declaring missions either started or complete, so I think they are getting the hang of things.

For next class, I hope that each group has made significant progress toward finishing their time period descriptions. By Tuesday of next week I would expect these to be pretty much complete so that we can move to different groups. This is important, and I don't mind spending time setting the groundwork, but I also don't want to stagnate.

Iberian History and Culture: Day 2

Iberian History and Culture Day 2 -- Iberia and D&D

Today was our second day of Iberian History and Culture. I've never taught a class with better energy. I have over 30 students, and most of them seem to be interested and involved. When I walked into class the students were already in their groups, and they were talking about their group projects.

We are still working out some of the kinks with document sharing. I've decided on a method I've used before in which students open a public Google Doc, make a copy of it, and then share it back with me. I can then drop those shared docs in an unshared and private folder. It feels like a bit more hassle than it should be, but students seem to be grasping it pretty well. I've got nearly everyone's "Mission Log" already.

One of my biggest questions going into this semester was: "What is class going to look like?" For now I like the format that we did today. I started class with a discussion of the terms España and Iberia, which was really a discussion about multiple nationalities inside of the Peninsula.

After that, we got into the nuts and bolts of the Google Docs. I love having students in class with their devices -- laptops, tablets, and smartphones -- because they can try stuff out while I'm explaining it, and we can troubleshoot on the fly. Discussion of the Google Docs turned into questions about what I actually want them to produce. I read a bit from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook so that they could get a feel for what I expect out of their current group work.

I currently have them divided by century, and I want them to produce a description of what is going on in Iberia during the time they are researching. I had them brainstorm a bit in groups and then we decided that the key categories they will have in their descriptions are:

  • Government/Politics
  • Medicine
  • Art/Culture/Education
  • Weapons and Warfare
  • Economy

Two students also volunteered for a mission to build a spreadsheet showing the relative value of coinage in the different time periods. I think it will be useful.

One student asked if they are supposed to choose an actual character from history or if they are to invent their own. I told them they are to create their own.

Another student asked if our Rulebook will be based on a fantasy structure. I showed them this video:

I then told them that this game will be similar to D&D, but without the fantasy elements. The most "fantasy" we will see will be based on the religious beliefs of the characters. More about this later.

Finally, a student approached me after class, and he said that he is excited about the class, but worried because he is having a hard time seeing the whole picture. I told him that I don't mind that he doesn't see the whole picture -- I don't see it all myself -- but that he should see enough to know what he should work on before the next class. I think the key for this semester is going to be to keep the students with enough concrete understanding of what is going on that they don't feel lost, and at the same time allowing them to collaborate in the creation of the big picture. So far, I feel like it is working well.

Moving forward, I need to get the students onto the Google Docs where they will be building their time period descriptions. It will be cool when I can see that they are building something.

Iberian History and Culture: Day 1

RPG Day 1

Yesterday was our first day of History and Culture of Spain: RPG Style.

I was listening to an episode of Back to Work the other day with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin, and they were talking about perfectionists. Merlin made a pretty interesting case for defining perfectionism not as the desire to continue to work on something until it is perfect, but the fear of starting anything because it might not be.

None of my students will ever accuse me of being a perfectionist in this sense of the word.

I started class yesterday by going over the syllabus. This did not take very long considering that the syllabus can be summed up with the following:

1) We will study Iberian history and culture through a game framework.

2) We will spend half of the semester building the game and half the semester playing it.

3) Students' grades will be based on XP, which they will gain by accomplishing missions in a few basic categories:

* Game Construction
* Gameplay
* Attendance and Participation
* Blogs
* Reading and Research

That's it.

After I explained those basic rules to the students, I had them download a dice app like Pip to their mobile devices, and we rolled for characters based on the plan you see here.

I know that I'm not covering all possible combinations of class, religion, and race in the peninsula during the time periods we will be focusing on, but I think I am allowing for enough variation that the students will come to understand the diversity of the peninsula.

So we rolled for characters, and it was really fun. For some reason, I had far more students roll for the 15th and 17th centuries than I did for the 6th and 20th. I decided to not to try to adjust things. We will see how it goes.

I finished class by grouping the students by century and letting them start to plan out how they will build their Core Rules and descriptions.

The one thing that I haven't quite figured out yet (and I really need to) is how to handle all of the document sharing that will take place in this class. I'm sure that Google Docs is the best solution. I'll roll it out slowly and hopefully we won't have too many snags. The possible missions and some rules are in this document.

Senior Administration

I came across this last night in my Pocket queue, and it reminded me of just how glad I am to have good senior adminsitration here at SUU. Being new on the job, it's nice to be at a smaller school where I feel like I have a relationship with the Dean and the Provost -- along with our excellent department chair. It's also nice to feel like I can trust them.

Check out Perlmutter's article and let me know what you think.

"Know the Vital Players in Your Career: Senior Administrators"

by David D. Perlmutter

More thoughts on RPGs and my Spanish History and Culture Class

Yesterday I spent some more time trying to plan out my RPG for my Spanish History and Culture class this coming semester. I want to focus at least the first few weeks of class to having students research their characters, and I want their characters to be unique and believable.

I spent some time working in my favorite mind mapping app, MindNode Pro, and I was able to come up with the following system for setting out a character profile.

My biggest question right now has to do with gender and class. I have taken a basic D&D list of classes and modified it a bit so that it will favor the historical nature of our game. These are my current classes:

  • Warrior
  • Merchant
  • Rogue
  • Cleric
  • Healer
  • Hunter

I want to be open to the idea that there have been women of each of these classes in each of my time periods, but I don’t want to create a false sense of gender equality where there clearly was not. I’ll have to think about this some more.

But for now, with a simple six-sided dice, I can have students roll and come up with some interesting character profiles. For example, I rolled for six characters yesterday and I came up with this:

1 2 3 4 5 6
Birth Year 1600 1600 1912 1474 1600 558
Race Basque Castilian Catalan Jew Jew Visigoth
Religion Catholic Catholic Atheist Jew Jew Arian
Religion Modifier 4 5 2 1 4 6
Gender M F M F F F
Class Warrior Rogue Cleric Healer Warrior Warrior

The religion modifier tells the level of faith or commitment to one’s religious system. This will be used to calculate their ability to use their faith to act in the game. A religion modifier of 1 would mean that the character has little faith in their religion, a modifier of 6 would mean that they have the highest level of faith in their religion. I plan on having students be able to use religion in much the same way that it is used in D&D, but I want students to do the research and design how that will work.

Finally, yesterday I spent some time playing World of Warcraft, and I really enjoyed it. My character is a Panda, so I’m in the Mists of Pandaria. I love how clear each mission is, and I love watching my character develop over time. I want to mirror both of those things from the first day of class. I think that will be very important.

My WoW character Tunlang

Let the Games Begin: Diving into RPGs

World of Warcraft

Bastion

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Yesterday I did some more reading in Reality is Broken (which I mentioned here), and I was so convinced by McGonigal’s arguments that I decided to dive into some RPGs on my Mac and iOS devices. I’m going to try out World of Warcraft, because it seems like the industry standard, and I also picked up [Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic][kor] for 5$ on the Mac App Store. I’ve always been a big Star Wars fan, and after about an hour of play last night, I can say that I’m very pleased with it. The computer does a lot of the RPG leg work for me, but I feel like it is still giving me a better idea of how these kind of games work. Some people complained on the App Store about it running slow or lagging, but I didn’t have any problems on my MacBook Pro.

The World of Warcraft starter package was a HUGE download, so I wasn’t able to open it up last night. I’ll get to it today. I’m looking forward to it.

For iOS I decided after some research to go with Bastion. It doesn’t have nearly the complexity of a game like Knights of the Old Republic or WoW, but it has stunning visuals, and a great wild west narrator that follows you along. I had to force myself to put it down last night so that I could get some sleep. I definitely prefer this game on the iPad over the iPhone. The hand-painted landscapes look fantastic on the retina screen.

So that’s where I’m at right now. Do any of you have any suggestions on other great video games I should try?

Some Thoughts on Spanish Comics

Today my good friends and colleagues Dale Pratt and Juan Carlos Martín visited campus. At noon we had a great conversation with some of our great students about graduate school. Then in the early evening we had our Tears in the Rain presentation.

I am so glad that so many of my students and colleagues were able to make it out, especially considering the big snow storm that blew in this afternoon. I felt like all three presentations went well, but what really made the evening great was the conversation we had afterward. We had great well-thought questions and a good chance to chat about memory, science fiction, and the future of humanity.

One of the best and toughest questions came from my colleague Iliana Portaro. She asked us how we would define graphic novel and how much we knew about the history of the graphic novel in Spain. I responded that for me a graphic novel is essentially a long-form comic or a collection of shorter issues that form a long arc. I like the definition that Scott McLoud gives for comics in his book Undersanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which is that comics are "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

As far as the history of comics in Spain are concerned, I really know next to nothing as this is a field I am just dabbling in for the time being. I did find this Wikipedia article in English that gives a general overview since the 1940s, and this one that gives a much more detailed view of things since the early 20th century. While these articles focus on the industry in Spain, I would also point out that there are notable works by people from Spain in international markets. Perhaps most notable among these are Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido (click here to pick it up at Amazon), and the highly touted artwork on the new run of Hawkeye by David Aja.

Like I said, I'm really new to all of this. If you have any suggestions about great comics from Iberia or done by Iberian or Hispanic American writers or artists, I'd be happy to hear about them in the comments below.

Turning Class into a Game

Over the past couple of weeks I've been re-thinking some of what I want to do in my classroom. This all started in a training with Grant Corser in which we were talking about planning a course based on specific learning outcomes. I've always known this was important, but for some reason in that meeting, I feel like I had some clarity that I've struggled to find until now.

Specifically, I was thinking about my upcoming SPAN 3510 class in which I will be teaching about the history and culture of Spain. I have two main goals for this class:

1) I want students to have a general outline of the history of Spain in their heads.

2) I want students to be able to research a specific time and place and to be able to imagine what it would be like to live there.

For the first objective, I could teach a traditional course, but the second objective seems to require a different approach. I decided early on that I would like for students to blog in the voice of a character that they develop as they research Spain.

That is about as far as I was able to get with this until I met with Todd Petersen. He is the head of the Creativity Center here at SUU and a great sounding board for out-of-the-box thinking. As I spoke to him about my idea, we started brainstorming the idea of turning class into a Dungeons & Dragons style Role Playing Game that I could in part design but that the students could flesh out. Todd then put me in contact with Dallin Bundy, an adjunct English professor and a Dungeon Master. Over the past couple of weeks Dallin has been giving me a crash course in D&D, and I think that this class is going to be great.

Todd Petersen also recommended to me the book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal, which is really helping me to re-think how I approach teaching and how I can leverage my class time and make class better for my students. This an exciting time for me. I feel a lot of great creative energy and I look forward to having a great class next semester.

Finally, yesterday I ran into a friend of mine who is a fantasy writer, Ladd de Winter, and he has begun helping me to generate ideas as well.

I feel like I've got a good team of people helping me, and I think this idea has potential to go somewhere. I've got a few weeks now to figure it all out.

Tears in the Rain

On Tuesday, December 3, my good friends and colleagues Dale Pratt and Juan Carlos Martin will be visiting SUU. Dale is the graduate student coordinator at BYU, and he will be giving a presentation and meeting with students interested in graduate school at 12pm that day. Juan Carlos happens to be in town and he is coming down because at 5pm that same day we will be giving a presentation together (along with Dale). We will start with individual ten minute presentations about Rosa Montero's 2011 novel Tears in the Rain, and then we hope to have a great informal discussion with those in attendance about technology, humanity, the humanities, and the future. The novel is great, and the presentations will be entertaining, but I'm really looking forward to the discussion afterward.

Disability Week

This post should have come last week, but better late than never. Because of my interest in autism I was asked to participate on the planning committee for SUU's Disability Week. It was a a great opportunity to work with some fantastic people. I was asked to participate on an autism panel with law enforcement, parents, and students with autism. I always enjoy informing the public about autism, and I'm happy to do this kind of service. The highlight of the week for me was when I had the chance to give a short introduction to the film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on Thursday night. I tried to go in with a written text but ended up scrapping it in favor of a more informal presentation -- something like what I do in class. I talked about Emmanuel Levinas and his theory of Totality and Infinity. I love Levinas because while his theories are deep and broad, I can teach elements of his thought in just a few minutes and it changes the way my students read/watch/view art. I could tell during the the film that the audience was locked in, and I like to think that my intro had something to do with that, although the film is so good it hardly needs any intro at all.

All told, I think that Carmen Alldredge and her whole team did a great job with disability week. I look forward to seeing what they come up with next year.

Joss Whedon on Productivity

I am currently writing a piece about autism and Joss Whedon's and John Cassaday's Gifted volume of the Astonishing X-Men, so I was naturally interested in this article, which featuries a discussion about creativity with Whedon. He has been enormously (superhumanly?) productive over the past few years, and I am always interested in how people get stuff done. In the interview, Whedon jokes about not having finished David Allen's Getting Things Done, but he is obviously familiar with the principles -- the most important of which is identifying next actions. I've found in my own work that when a project stalls it is because I have not clearly defined the next concrete action associated with that project. Nearly all of my thinking on this comes from Allen's book and from Merlin Mann on his Back to Work podcast. I am currently about neck deep in a bunch of different projects, and the only way I am staying sane is by having a list I can trust (I am a big fan of OmniFocus) and by doing the next thing on that list.