Sprekers en presentaties Picnic Young 2008
Hier leest u meer over de sprekers en de presnetaties van de PICNIC YOUNG SPECIALS.
De voertaal op het seminar is Engels.
Klik hier voor een beschrijving van de PICNIC YOUNG LABS.
Mijn Naam is Haas: a revolution in language education.
A true serious game, that unites learning with children's creativity into a virtual, story environment.
Mijn naam is Haas (My name is Hare) is a serious game concept that teaches young children (age 4-6 years)
language in a playful environment. Through drawing the world of character Haas, the ingenuity of children is
challenged. The system fuses the child's drawings into the emerging story and uses an Intelligent Tutoring System
to connect them to learning components, such as situations or specific words. Scientific revaluation of the
educational methods is provided by the Expertisecentrum Nederlands (National Center for Language Education).
Extensive testing sessions on several schools in the Netherlands have already shown excellent results.
Mijn naam is Haas is a charming and strong serious game which shows the value of virtual environments in an
educational setting for a very early age group. In Haas' universe, learning and playing are interwoven. Children
work at the computer in pairs and interact with each other, as well as with Haas. This results in a dialogue
between the physical and virtual world. The creativity and fantasy of children combined with little powerful
situations form immersive storylines. Form, content and interaction blend into a setting that subliminally
communicates the learning components.
We are currently developing an online environment of Mijn naam is Haas. Through partnerships across different
media we hope to bring the product to an international audience. Hence the product's final shape and content
will be determined by target specific markets and languages.
Mijn naam is Haas offers many possibilities for content created by children. The presentation will give an insight
into our vision of the future of Haas' universe.
Speakers: Berend Weij and Sanneke Prins are creative and passionate design professionals. They both attained a
Master of Arts degree in Interactive Multimedia and Digital Media Design, respectively. Together with third partner,
Douwe-Sjoerd Boschman, the Amsterdam based company brings together the expertise and experience of three
different designers. Strong conceptual and storytelling skills are combined with a user centered design process
and produced in charming, esthetically attractive products like Mijn naam is Haas.
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Yo! Opera: De Zingende Stad (The City Sings)
De Zingende Stad (The City Sings) is an educational project by Yo! Opera. Students (aged six – twelve) map the school and its surroundings vocally. In music lessons and locative learning programmes songs and sounds are connected to specific places. What does your school sound like? Or your street, your hood, your house? What was the sound in the past, and what will it be in the future?
Students make their own musical quest for mobile phone. Goal of Yo! Opera is to develop an educational programme available for all Dutch primary schools in 2009/2010.
Yo! Opera considers music and singing more than just artistic disciplines. Yo! Opera stimulates creative, social and communicative development in young people, and aims to make a significant contribution to music education in both primary and secondary schools. The emphasis extends beyond just music, encompassing a broader social context.
Openbare Basisschool De Rietendakschool, Utrecht and Waag Society are partners in De Zingende Stad.
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Eric Klopfer - Augmented reality MIT
The MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) has been creating “Augmented Reality” (AR) simulations to engage people in simulation games that combine real-world experiences with additional information supplied to them by handheld computers. AR simulations embed participants inside lifelike situations and help them understand the complex scientific and social dynamics underlying authentic problems in a variety of subject areas including the sciences (e.g., ecology, environmental science, geological sciences, forensics, and health sciences) as well as more diverse content areas including history, economics, local sociology, math and language arts. Participants in these distributed simulations use location-aware handheld computers (Windows Mobile devices), allowing them to physically move throughout a real-world location (e.g., a college campus, nature centre, zoo, museum, local community, etc.) while collecting simulated field data, interviewing virtual characters, and collaboratively investigating simulated scenarios.
For example, our most recent game TimeLab, starts with a video that sets the players 100 years in the future when global climate change has wreaked havoc on Cambridge. They are then sent back in time to present day to study ballot initiatives that could potentially remediate the effects of global climate change in the future. Players walk around the MIT campus and surrounding areas collecting information (real and virtual) on methods of reducing climate change and the impact of climate change on Cambridge. For example, at one point they look across the Charles River as they stand on near a road on the MIT campus, they consider how 100 years in the future that location is often under water from floods, and think about ways that those floods could be prevented. In the end, the players choose a number of ballot initiatives that they must debate, and through some simple game mechanics ultimately find out whether those measures are approved and what impact they have.
Much of the work in STEP focuses not only on making individual games, but also on making tools so that others can make these kinds of games quickly and easily. Currently STEP develops a simple editor for kids, a more complicated full-featured editor, and an on-location editor that people can use to create games in the field. All three of these operate on a common format making it feasible to approach game-making from multiple perspectives.
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MobileMath
In early 2008 Pieter Nieuwland College (Amsterdam), Via Nova College (Utrecht), Vathorst College (Amersfoort) made a first step into using mobile gaming for maths education in secondary education by piloting MobileMath.
In MobileMath students have to score as much points as possible by walking along imagined quadrangles, squares or parallelograms in the area around their schools. MobileMath is a team game; a team consists of two players who use one mobile phone. On its screen they see a street map of the playing field, their team and the other teams represented as moving dots as they move through the area. The geometrical figures are shown in the colours of the corresponding team. As the playing field fills up with these figures the possibility to score decreases; the teams claim the playing field as in the board game Risk.
The players claim a virtual quadrangle by visiting the physical location of its corners and saving them online. Different types of figures carry different weight, the more difficult they are to make the higher they score. Players need to develop a good understanding of quadrangles. Further a good analysis of the map and the surroundings is useful.
Players face the dilemma between taking the time for a large of complicated figure and the risk that another team crosses their plans by guessing the aim from the points already set and quickly placing a smaller figure that would block completion.
MobileMath is a game developed by the Freudenthal Institute and Waag Society. MobileMath is an extension to the Dutch EduGIS portal and is partly funded by the innovation programme Ruimte voor Geo-Informatie (RGI).
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Wrts mobile
Wrts is a derivative from the English ‘words’. In Dutch we would pronounce this as ‘wurts’. Leave the ‘u’ out and you get ‘Wrts’.
Wrts.nl is an online vocabulary testing program frequently used by students.
Students can enter their own words, import wordlists provided by commercial publishers, share wordlists and test themselves in various ways. The website is very popular: at the moment there are nearly 650.000 users.
To be able to use the program the students need access to a computer, which is not always available. However, nearly all students possess a mobile phone. In the future even simple phones will have wifi and/or Internet connection.
A mobile version of the testing program Wrts.nl offers students added value. Through a mobile version of the program students can practice and test vocabulary online without a computer.
With a mobile phone or PDA Wrts.nl is available to students in class, in breaks, during ‘lost’ moments when periods are cancelled, in free periods: any time, any place.
Wrts is developed in corporation with De Digitale School, a foundation that offers alternative teaching methods and digital pathways to students and teachers.
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Games Atelier
Location-based Learning: the city as your playground
How can a city be transformed into a learning environment? How can the cities rich culture and history be combined with mobile media, narrative structures and game-play into an educational location-based experience? In search for answers foundation Waag Society, a Dutch medialab, develops new ways for students to create their own forms of urban play.
Foundation Waag Society - a medialab based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands - researches how creative technologies can lead to social innovation in education, culture, healthcare and the public domain. Important expertises include Creative Learning and Locative Media, which in the last few years have resulted in projects such as Games Atelier.
Games Atelier is a two-year program dedicated to developing a new learning method based on the educational value of designing, playing and reflecting on location-based games. Children will go through all stages creating a large pilot on citizenship based on city themes like cultural diversity and urban lifestyle.
Games Atelier is supported by 7scenes: an online and mobile platform to create, play and share GPS-based games, tours and stories. 7scenes is both for personal use and for organisations to run their own location-based projects. Additionally, 7scenes has a special focus for use in education and the cultural sector.
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Donkeypedia
Donkeypedia is a cross media project with a donkey that travels through European nations, a quest for the identity of children and youngsters. The donkey will carry various devices (laptop, GPS, camera etc) and will be digitally directed by local children, from village to city, from province to province, from nation to nation. Children will collect stories, art expressions, movies and objects that represent something essential about their place and its residents, resulting in a kaleidoscopic platform that reveals the European identity bit by bit, step by step. Donkeypedia starts its walk as pilot on 29th of august 2008 in the Netherlands, where it’ll walk a month from the North of Holland to Amsterdam. Donkey ‘Cashmir’ will visit Picnic at the 24th of August.
Italian Cristian Bettini originates Donkeypedia in 2006. He developed the concept together with Dutch producer Frank Alsema (4xM) at European media courses. In 2007 a test walk took place in Italy. Donkeypedia is funded by Digital Pioneers, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunsten, NCDO, Interregeling e-cultuur and European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008.
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Ar2Unite / L3D
Maarten Selten is an English teacher at UniC, a modern secondary school in England. For L3D he assists schools with the use of educational worlds. L3D is a non-profit organization that helps schools setting up projects in 3-D learning environments such as Ar2Unite, a project between schools in the Netherlands and Hong Kong.
The goal of the 3-D environment was to create a museum and exchange point of international art. Dutch pupils had to study the works of real artists and afterwards make their own painting based on what they had learned from that artist. Eventually they put their paintings in buildings that they designed themselves and were built by people from L3D. The school from Hong Kong had boat art as their project. They tried to show how 'arty' boats could be, especially in a city with so much naval and maritime activity.
This world ended up in a great mix of cultural expressions formed by pupils on opposite sides of the world. After the first year we continued the project in the Netherlands for the teacher and the pupils thought of it as very interesting, meaningful and fun.
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David Nieborg
David Nieborg is an expert on games, games culture, innovation and game technology. He lectures at the University of Amsterdam.
David B. Nieborg graduated cum laude at Utrecht University on the interaction between popular culture and the U.S. Army, using the PC First Person Shooter game America’s Army as a case study. His MA-thesis “Changing the Rules of Engagement - Tapping into the Popular Culture of America’s Army, the Official U.S. Army Computer Game” was awarded a finalist position at the ‘2005 Dutch National Thesis Trophy’.
Nieborg published on his work on the military entertainment complex and the implications of the interaction between commercial game culture, technology, marketing and military culture in various journals, book chapters and conference proceedings - both national and international.
Today, David is affiliated as a PhD-student with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), a research institute dedicated to the interdisciplinary study and analysis of contemporary culture. His PhD discusses the political economy of the game industry.
Since August 2005, David is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Humanities, department of Media and Culture studies. In Amsterdam he coordinates courses, supervises BA and MA theses, and teaches seminars and lectures on new media and digital culture, participatory culture, new media tools, and game studies.
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Self City
Self City is a (serious) game to train social skills, developed for adolescents who are socially and emotionally impaired. The expectation that a simulation game like Self City contributes to the players’ social values in reality is based on various publications, which argue that these games help develop skills such as process-oriented thinking and conflict resolution outside the game. Other research shows that young people with concentration difficulties can focus on games for long periods of time.
A test environment is developed with teachers and pupils within Second Life Teen. In the game, teens can walk around online in the virtual city ‘Self City’. The goal is to go the cinema. On the way, the teens find themselves in challenging social situations and learn to deal with them. The teens play the game using an avatar, and are accompanied by a daemon - an alter ego - which advices them in conflict situations. If the teen gets angry, the daemon suggests alternative actions.
The target group displays stereotypical behaviour and finds it difficult to assume different roles and often encounter conflicts in socially complex situations. A problem with social skills training is that few gain from this since their problem is functioning in groups. In a computer game, teens can form a virtual group without experiencing it as a ‘real’ group. The psychological theory of the Dialogical Self, which focuses on the ability to incorporate different behavioural strategies, is used to define the functional model of the game.
Six test sessions were held to determine whether the mediated form of interaction is more effective than real-life role play, resulting in the following findings:
-Students are able to handle the game. They quickly get the hang of navigating and talking, and identify with the environment enough to be able to relate to it;
-Students do not immediately see the avatar as an extension of themselves, but the game succeeds at persuading the pupils to demonstrate their usual behaviour and to correct it;
-Students recognize the daemon as a ‘buddy’, but it must be assigned a very active role in order to be truly effective.
In developing the game further, storytelling sessions are organized with pupils and drama teachers to assess which situations are difficult for the pupils and what sort of behaviour, language and strategies need to part of the game for it to be challenging and fun.
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Josephine Dorado (Zoomlab)
Collaborative performance as culture mash up will explore performance as communication and cultural exchange in virtual space through theatrical frameworks such as improvisational structures, narrative creation, identity exploration/role-play, and personal expression through sound and movement. These creative, collaborative processes engage the participants in a mash up of method, art and culture while fostering an environment of receptivity and fun.
Josephine Dorado is a New York-based media artist, performer and social entrepreneur. In her work, she explores the extension of the performance environment with technology, often utilizing movement-based, sensor-driven synthesis and networked telepresence. She is also interested in the process of cultural exchange through creative interplay in virtual spaces, which led to founding ZoomLab and initiating the Kidz Connect program, which connects students internationally via creative collaboration in virtual worlds such as Second Life. Josephine currently teaches at the New School, where she received her M.A. in Media Studies in 2006. She was a Fulbright scholarship recipient and an artist-in-residence at the Waag Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and continues her involvement with Fulbright as a member of the Board of Directors. Performances include interdisciplinary productions for the ISEA and Romaeuropa Festivals as well as speaking engagements at SIGGRAPH, Queen’s University in Belfast, and London Knowledge Lab. Upcoming ventures include Fractor, for which a MacArthur Foundation award was received, and several mixed reality projects involving dance theatre, motion capture analysis and Second Life performance. Josephine’s experience ranging from theatre for at-risk children to technology and design, brings perspectives on theatre-inspired collaborative methodologies as well as the issues of working within a virtual context.
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