September 10, 2009 by Bill.

I like to watch TED videos on my iPod Touch. I think TED stands for Technology, Education and Design. What happens is that the TED folks assemble some of the greatest thinkers on the planet to come together on a routine basis to talk about stuff.

Sounds ordinary, right? Well, the “stuff” they talk about is truly extraordinary. You’ll just have to run out to the TED web site and watch one or two to get the drift of what I’m talking about.

So, last night I’m working out on the elliptical machine at Bally Fitness and I’m watching a TED video by Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel show “Dirty Jobs.”  This guy, dressed in ordinary workaday clothing, has no PowerPoint presentation, no props, no videos or music or gimmicks. He just stands up there and tells a story.

The story he tells is at once riveting and repulsive. He talks about castrating lambs on a ranch in Craig, Colorado–how it’s expected to be done, and how it’s actually done, and the difference between the two.

But the talk isn’t important because you learn something about castration. That part is fascinating and entertaining–Rowe is a very good story-teller.

What’s salient about Rowe’s 20 minutes is that he makes a very important American point: We’re losing the job battle.

While we have heartfelt and strong dialogs (diatribes?) about important things like health care reform and American soldiers overseas,  we have almost lost the notion of what it means to be an American worker. Rowe talks about the need for technical schools and colleges; not enough plumbers, carpenters, electricians and the like. Not enough mechanical engineers–heck, not enough engineers period.

Not enough people willing to a) dig into the math, physics, chemistry and other hard topics required to understand the deepness of engineering, and/or b) not enough people willing to bend over and get their hands dirty and backs aching in the process of carrying out good old fashioned American work.

Rowe’s point is that it’s job first, other things second. In one part of the video, he talks about “safety third,” meaning that despite the platitude of “safety first” and OSHA laws, and of course each person’s regard for their own well-being, nevertheless workers undertake things like mining, deep-sea fishing, logging and other dangerous occupations because they’re good jobs, they pay well and they feed families.

He doesn’t say it, but I think the point stands out: In many cases, we’ve let ideology get in the way of practicality. Case in point: so-called “green” jobs. Pundits and politicians bring platitudes that talk about the need to switch over from 20th century energy sources to renewable energy methodologies.

Fine. I have no argument with that–though I don’t think the economics bear out a short-term forklift switching over to renewables from conventional energy resources. The problem is that we’ve let strongly ideological environmental groups get in the way of progress toward renewable energy goals. Can’t build offshore wind turbines in the north Atlantic because the folks on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard will see them in the distance and their white blades spinning away will disturb the pristine view. It’s a beautiful site on Maui I can tell you. Don’t know why it’s anathema off the New England coast.

Can’t build transmission lines leading from a humongous concentrating solar array in the Desert Southwest to the nation’s cities because that would involve drilling holes in the ground for tower caissons and stringing unsightly wire across miles of American soil.

Can’t drill for natural gas–of which T. Boone Pickens claims there is enough for “100 years’ worth of clean-burning energy for Americans.” Why? Because drilling disrupts natural environments, and makes things unsightly and causes animals to have to rethink their living patterns or worse, kills them, and, well, there’s just something ideologically wrong about drilling for gas when there are other renewable energy sources we could be using instead. Never mind that the payback periods and inefficiencies of said renewables really aren’t sufficient enough for us to adopt them in a wholesale fashion…yet. Given enough time (decades) sure, we’re there. We’re all over that. But right now what we need is gas and coal and oil and power lines and power plants and refineries.

Which takes me back to jobs. It is ideologically unpleasant to watch Rowe’s Dirty Jobs TED talk because he talks about the politically correct (and wrong) method for castrating a lamb. And then he talks about an American worker who is, in the immortal words of Larry the Cable Guy, able to “get ‘er done.” And the getting it done is actually better for the lamb, as it turns out. Oh, and it keeps ranchers employed.

So here’s the thing: Rowe is talking about something very basic and important. What he’s really saying is that we need to put America back to work. Which means that a lot of the students in our schools today really shouldn’t be planning on going to college to study things like history, and psychology, and social topics. The jobs just aren’t there in numbers large enough to support a lot of students in those majors.

Instead, students should be planning on going into technical schools to learn about jobs that are important to Americans. For example, Process Tech, a major students can take at many community colleges across the country, teaches young people how to properly operate industrial facilities such as power plants, factories, and such.

We need welders, carpenters, electricians, brick-layers, mechanics, linemen (OK, linepersons), cosmetologists, machine workers, miners, loggers, and other skilled tradepersons. We need to get back to building and farming. We need dental hygienists and nurses. We need engineers.

We’ve got plenty of psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists (and other ‘ists), cultural studies majors, historians, and English majors. Boat’s full. Don’t major there. No jobs there. Nothing to do or see there.

What we don’t need is one more guy or gal with a history degree working as a barista.

(As an aside, one thing I noticed on a recent trip to Europe this summer was that all of England, France and Italy was planted. Not with Kentucky blue grass, but with stuff people can eat and use. Corn, hops, wheat, sunflowers, lavender, and yes, tobacco. The land wasn’t allowed to lie fallow. It was used. While I recognize if you drive through eastern Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas you’re going to see lots of crops, I still wonder what the proportion of crops grown in America by acre of soil is to Europe. I bet there’s a drastic difference. It made me think: where are all the American farmers?)

Rowe’s point is that, of necessity, American jobs have to be dirty jobs. If we’re to maintain the status quo in this country, feed and educate our kids, house ourselves, maintain our health and make this country better–what I’m talking about is good old-fashioned improving our lot–we’ve got to get our hands dirty again. And our backs aching. And our bodies and minds working in harmony in the process of creating things that people need in order to live.

Turns out our ancestors had the right idea. It’s the dirty jobs that are the best jobs after all.

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August 31, 2009 by Bill.

Let me get this out right away: I’m not a game player. I own a Wii, but seldom play it. I bought a copy of “Left for Dead”–a popular zombie game–for my PC, but never play it. I own a Nintendo DS and every once in awhile play a card game called “Three Peaks” that I enjoy, but I don’t overdo it, with the exception of when we’re laying on a beach in Cancun and the only thing I’ve got to do is drink, sleep and play Nintendo DS. Then I overdo it. I also have a couple of games on my Apple Touch, but I only play my Mahjong game, and the last time I played that was when we were on a tour bus driving through the hillsides of France.

That said, I do believe in the power of teaching kids how to program games because I believe there is real power in connecting with students at their level, helping them understand the incredible effort game companies go to just to bring entertainment to people.

This is my third year teaching a game programming class. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve stumbled around with this topic quite a bit. I intuitively knew some things: that the C++ programming language, for example, is required as the language for most commercial games. (Oh sure, there are indies, and indie languages and game engines, but the real truth is that C++ is still the prevalent language within game programming companies.)  I also know that you have to have graphics for games, but at first didn’t have much of an idea about how to get those graphics into the computer. I also knew that story was important (though lots of students will argue with you about that). And artwork, and music. Game programming is an incredibly rotund subject.

So here’s the thing: If you’re teaching game programming to kiddos, you have to teach a variety of subjects. I’ve come to realize these subjects have a very definite order: 1) Story, 2) Art, 3) Code, and 4) Music. So if you’re teaching game programming, you’re not only teaching students how to write C++, C#, Java or ActionScript 3 code, you’re also teaching them about developing stories, drawing, creating lifelike characters (2D or 3D), and other artwork (such as backgrounds, buildings, textures, sprites and spritesheets, etc.) and you’re working with music. Not to mention the soft skills like teambuilding, conflict-negotiation, and strategizing.

On top of that, you have to teach a fair amount of mathematics (algebra and trigonometry) and physics in the process, else budding game programmers won’t create realistic games.

If you’re teaching game programming, you’re practically teaching an entire school’s curriculum all in one classroom. Throw in some history, civics and current events, and maybe a little psychology and you’re covering the entire gamut. I would argue that many kids learn more about history through “Age of Empires” than their school history classes.

Here’s an even more amazing thing: I truly believe that if we teach more and more kids how to write games, and we show them how to bundle work products in those games, we can use games to solve some of the world’s weightiest problems.

What do I mean by that? Well, think about the SETI screensaver. The nutlogs at SETI, ever vigilant in scanning the universe for signals that indicate the presence of human life, use an ordinary screensaver to process data they’ve received from their telescopes. Anyone who downloads the SETI @ Home screensaver allows SETI to use their computer’s spare PC cycles to process data, assisting in the search for ETs.

Now that same kind of idea, put on steroids, could be used to find cures for cancer, AIDS, run computer models for weather and other high-end simulations, and yes, even work on data for space projects, among myriad other things. All while people think they’re playing a game. Clever game developers might even find a way for players’ avatars to participate in the process somewhat. An avatar might not look through a microscope and recognize a virulent disease, but the avatar might run a message, or push a button or perform some other task for researchers.

Think it can’t be done? Check out Free Rice. This game allows you to garner food for impoverished people in 3rd world nations, while simultaneously helping you with your vocabulary. It’s a crisp, robust, ingenious game that partners gamers, non-profits and hungry people.

So, it turns out that game programming is a really great thing to be teaching kiddos. They learn a ton of great stuff all wrapped up in a package they love. And once they get good at it, they might come together to create uber Free Rice games and involve Joe and Jenny Six-Pack in helping us work on problems–even though Joe and Jenny think they’re relaxing and enjoying playing a game.

Here’s the thing though: Teachers have to go through a serious paradigm shift if they’re going to teach all of the elements involved in a complex subject like game programming. It’s not just code, not just art, not just story: It’s bigger than a breadbox, and requires teachers to grow their own capabilities. I know I had to, and I’m still going through the growing pains. I’m just now using a set of books I think are really solid, and I know I’ve got a long, long way to go. But I also know I’ve got a GREAT bunch of kids who come to class every day, usually work through their break on their tasks, and happily read technical material and learn technical math in doing so. Education doesn’t get much better than that!

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July 18, 2008 by Bill.

For the last few weeks I’ve been involved in an excellent Professional Development (PD) program for teachers called Teacher Game Institute (TGI). The program is managed by several professors at the University of Denver (DU) with the aid of their amazingly capable and helpful graduate research assistants (GRAs). I believe TGI is at least partially underwritten by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program is dubbed P4Games. The four Ps stand for Programming, Pixels(art), Pedagogy, and Play (designing and play-testing games).

The idea is at once straightforward and yet profound in its potential to dramatically affect the way that teachers teach and kids learn when they’re at school. Prior to coming to TGI for the first week we were given a text to read: How Computer Games Help Children Learn, by David Williamson Shaffer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, ISBN 13-978-1-4039-7505-8. Shaffer eloquently dialogs about the things I’ve been thinking about public education ever since I began (my third career) teaching Computer Science at a Colorado high school three years ago. Personally I believe much of contemporary education (including lots of today’s educational philosophy as pushed by post-secondary institutions) is sooooo 20th century and very broken. Classes are generally not terribly hands-on.

Students enter the classroom, obtain a textbook, go through some sort of a content delivery process (I hate the word “lecture”), are given a worksheet or homework or both to help augment the learning, and dismissed after 55 minutes of class time to go on to their next session. Students are expected to sit up, pay attention, listen carefully to what’s being said, take notes, and make every effort to contribute as much as they can to their educational process. It is, after all, their education. Students are tested, tested, tested and then tested some more because somewhere in the goofy No Child Left Behind (NCLB) philosophy, bean-counters have decided that unless we objectively see numbers, we have no way of knowing if a kid’s learning what we’re teaching. (While there’s some merit to this, and I’m a believer in formative and summative assessments, I think we’ve gone overboard in the testing process and are now actually doing our children a disservice by assessing them so much.)

The problem is this: Today’s kids don’t fit this mold very well. First of all there are way too many things competing for their attention: boyfriends and girlfriends and friends in general, family members, both parents working, single parent households, poverty, affluence, video games, drugs, and sports not to mention the whole universe that makes up the school’s ecosystem - “stoners”, “skaters”, “jocks”, and so forth: in other words the school’s cliques.  Not to mention all of the flash and advertising they get from media content in all its forms. My guess is there is hardly a place kids can go that lacks the pizzazz of living in media-driven America. (Think church is the one sanctuary? Guess again. In most larger churches, there are coffee-shops and with them the various banners and buzz associated with the church’s programs. Churches actually have customized coffee cozies that look like Starbucks, but advertise the church’s program(s) du jour.

Second, near as I can tell, kids don’t read anymore. I don’t mean they never pick up a book, magazine or newspaper and read a snippet or two. Of course that goes on. But I believe the notion of actively reading the printed page to gain information isn’t within the purview of most American students. Of course there are exceptions. I’m not saying all students are this way. I’m just saying that as a general educational trend, students don’t get their information from books and periodicals. They’re much more inclined to go to the Internet for their information, or obtain it second-hand from friends or other sources. Urban myths abound in this communication system, and kids believe nearly anything.

 Thirdly, and probably most importantly, it appears that students are as comfortable or maybe even much more comfortable in the virtual world than they are in the physical. For example, there is a sense of empowerment and usefulness that comes with the World of Warcraft (WOW) universe which students may have a very hard time duplicating in their regular lives. I’m just a 16-year-old high-school student by day, but in the privacy of my bedroom I become a warlock, priest, warrior or other important person in the virtual world. I actually mean something to somebody and can be of productive assistance.

This, I believe, is the most important differentiation between us adults and our kids. If you and I escape into a golf game or run away to a Cancun all-inclusive for a few days, we’re still connected to the world around us. But kids who immerse themselves into WOW aren’t. They’ve disconnected and they’re deep into a new world that we don’t understand. They’re at play, yes. But they’re also engaged with virtual others in a completely new and different universe, where roles and goals are quite different from the mundane today. I can appreciate that this is terribly satisfying. Who among us would not like to completely get away from our world for an extended period of time? Truly, does this not explain adults’ need for happy hour during the week?

My point here isn’t to  trash WOW, though I’m not a big fan, or praise alcohol, which I imbibe in moderation. Blizzard Entertainment, WOW’s owner, is amazingly successful with millions of users paying $20/month to participate in the WOW universe.

I want to make a far bigger point: Games, especially video games in all their forms (online, PC, Nintendo Wii or DS, Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, etc.) are the happy hour for kids. It is their escape mechanism. The games are fun, stimulating, challenging, entertaining, enlightening, sometimes even educational (it is this sometimes part we need to work on). They take kids’ mind off of things. They teach kids how to quickly react to complex situations. (Don’t believe me? Try playing a simple game like Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, then we’ll talk.) They encourage kids to explore and discover. They get kids connected, talking, and working in teams.

Moreover, I think games have the ability to really teach kids the things they need to know.

Even more importantly, if playing the games is so useful, wouldn’t learning how to build them be even more fun and productive?

It is this mindset in which we were immersed in our TGI workshop. Most of the first two weeks’ of the workshop were spent the same way: 2 hours of programming instruction (using a cool open source game programming product called Greenfoot), 2 more hours of learning how to draw and use another really great open source product called Inkscape,  2 hours of pedagogy around teaching kids how to build games, and another 2 hours talking about game design, actually designing our own games and then “play-testing” them.

The second two weeks we were charged with writing our own game, and developing curriculum we could use in our classrooms. At the same time, the P4Games team was going through the same educational process they’d just taught us with a group of middle-school girls. The professors came in and announced: since we’re in the middle of heated political season with the presidential elections coming up and all, we should make a game around the election. This instruction went out to both teachers and students.

What I really, really liked about the TGI program was the cohesiveness of the subject matter. For example, the art professor was very gifted at helping us understand basic things about drawing such as perspective, shapes and color. We were introduced to charcoal drawing and drawing stacks of boxes to learn about how to draw perspectives, But eventually we were moved to Inkscape and with the help of a Wacom tablet we were able to move our drawings into the electronic world.

The game design professor, an extremely interesting man with a deep background in the subject, brought all kinds of new ideas to the class about what a game is and what it is not. For example, some things we think are games are actually toys, because they have no decisive finish or outcome - you simply play them.

The Computer Science (CS) professor was a bright, capable person who took some extremely technical programming ideas and principles and boiled them down so that the average person could understand them.

There were non-technical teachers in the class. You need never have ever written a line of code, or drawn even one thing to become a game developer. We learned all about coding and drawing and crafting. Two of the teachers in class were English oriented - one wanted to use games to envelop the things her kids were reading into a game so as to bring about a stronger sense of literature and meaning. Her early foray in to this area was quite good, extremely provocative, and, I suspect, will probably be a huge hit with her students. The students will read a little of the assigned book, then jump on the game to act like the protagonist for awhile.

The big point is this: The game isn’t the end-all, be-all. Getting to the game is what we’re after–it is the journey through the technical, art, design, math, science and business worlds that culminate in a satisfying game–this where the educational process really kicks in.

For example, kids have to understand the physics and math of a collision before they understand how to code one. Just getting characters to move on a 2D screen 20 pixels wide by 20 deep can be quite a challenge at first. Kids need to understand the coordinate system in 2-space, and then the commands that get their characters onto the screen. Only then can they get them moving. That said, getting your very own characters to move correctly based upon commands you gave them is quite a gratifying process.

Further, story is extremely important in games. No one wants to play a lame game with no backbone. We want strong protagonists and antagonists with sturdy plot structures, believeable environments and plot twists, and, of course, suspense, relationships and humor. So writing, coupled with a strong knowledge of literature and how to use it is a heavy requirement for successful game development.

And so on. There is almost nothing that is currently taught in a conventional high school that would not become relevant in a game programming enviornment - from music to Spanish to lacrosse - it’s all meaningful and useful. There is no subject that is not germane to game programming, and nothing that cannot become a game. For example, our game design professor instructed us one day to come up with a game all about red. Another day we had to design a game around the topic of sad.

I am very committed and motivated to helping kids understand how to write and produce games. What we need now is to develop entire curriculums and schools focused on the subject, using guided leadership and project-centric learning, funneling students through the discovery process that results in a game. Once you’ve gone through the TGI, you begin to understand the vision–how important the impact of game production can be on our students. There needs to be a switch in American education: game-centric high-schools! 

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