1. Playful Cleverness:hackers, games and creativity Kaido Kikkas Estonian IT College*** Tallinn University e-RuralNet Prnu 03.03.10

2. What are we talking about

Main idea: using computer games in teaching not only computer science but overall creativity

3. A glance into the historical hacker culture 4. The Battle for Wesnoth: one possible tool to bring the hacker model to classroom 5. Note: get the slides athttp://www.slideshare.net/UncleOwl 6. A Quote

Hackers are people who enjoy playful cleverness. - Richard Matthew Stallman

7. ??? 8. Hackers? Aren't they those bad guys who break into computers...? 9. Playful cleverness? 10. Long time ago, in another galaxy...

... OK, this was another universe (but hackers do like sci-fi)

11. A techno-subculture grown out of MIT and Stanford in the 60s (seeHackersby S. Levy) and later forming the backbone of free software and open source movements 12. Playful cleverness: essentially means doing serious work as if it was fun, and taking fun seriously. Some people call it creativity 13. Also see

Writings of Eric S. Raymond

14. Hacker Ethicby Pekka Himanen 15. The original MIT hacker code (Levy)

Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!

16. All information should be free 17. Mistrust authority promote decentralization 18. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position 19. You can create art and beauty on a computer 20. Computers can change your life for the better 21. A hacker code of the 90s (ESR)

The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved

22. No problem should ever have to be solved twice 23. Boredom and drudgery are evil 24. Freedom is good 25. Attitude is no substitute for competence 26. Recognition:

Do you identify with the goals and values of the hacker community?

27. Do you speak code, fluently? 28. Has a well-established member of the hacker community ever called you a hacker? 29. Hacker ethic (Himanen)

Linus' Law on human motivation

survival

30. social life 31. entertainmentCt Maslow! Also Wozniak's formula: H = F 3 32. Friday vs Sunday 33. Excessive speed kills 34. Caring 35. Do, or do not. There is no try. - Yoda 36. Bringing the hacker way to the classroom

Is playful cleverness also applicable in the academic setting?

37. One way to do it is game-based teaching 38. The Battle for Wesnoth open-source strategy game has been successfully used at TLU 39. Basics

Played on a hex map with several dozens of terrain types (influence movement and defense)

40. Hundreds of units in various (6 in default era) factions, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses, 2-5 levels (mostly 3), movement... 41. Day and night cycle vs the unit alignment 42. Economy based on gold, generated by villages 43. In campaign mode, surviving units from previous scenarios can be recalled 44. Missions may vary greatly (even if destroying enemies is the most common one) 45. OK, but why is it different?

Homo ludens :-)

46. Similar to teaching web design should give three kinds of skills:

Technology: coding (programming)

47. Design: artwork, maps, overall aesthetics 48. Content: scenarios and campaigns Compared to web design:

Technology is more prominent includes event-driven programming in addition to markup

49. Content is more affected by the other two (or vv) 50. Two cases up to now

Autumn 2007 TLU IMKE Master students, mostly with no or very basic programming skills; 6 persons (two teams of 3) participated

51. Spring 2008 TLU third-year computer science students with adequate to expert propgramming skills; more than 20 people (5 teams of 3-5) completed the course 52. Two rather different sets of people - yet the course worked in both cases 53. The point of the courses was not Wesnoth, but the open-source way of development 54. The ideas behind Open Source

Roots in the hacker culture of the 60s

55. Richard M. Stallman, the Father of Free Software 56. Linus Torvalds and Linux 57. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Note: he is also an active contributor to Wesnoth) 58. The avalanche grows: LAMP, GNOME/KDE, OpenOffice.org, Moodle ... 59. Not freeware: the zero price is not the point 60. The point is in collaboration, community, peer review and flexibility (and again: creativity) 61. What can be taught with Wesnoth?

Storytelling and expression, overall creativity

62. Graphical design 63. Animation 64. Markup (a possible step before moving to XHTML, XML, AJAX etc) 65. Event-driven programming 66. NB! Easier to 'sell' to non-technical students! 67. The good thing is that these can be mixed and balanced according to the audience, allowing a good range of accommodation 68. Campaign building

Write the storyline, design major events and divide them into scenarios

69. Choose/build units for main characters 70. For each scenario

Design (objectives, events)

71. Draw the map (considering terrain and starting points) 72. Choose units and recruitment scheme 73. Code the scenario Code the campaign summary 74. Test and balance 75. Storyline

Wesnoth has its own fictional history( http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/History_of_Wesnoth )as well as geography:http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Geography_of_Wesnoth

76. On the other hand, several interesting attempts have been made to base totally different storylines on the Wesnoth engine 77. Eric S. Raymond has written the Wesnoth campaign design How-To: http://www.catb.org/~esr/wesnoth/campaign-design-howto.html 78. Wesnoth map editor 79. Wercator map converter

By Brennan Sellner

80. Converts Wesnoth maps to fancy graphical maps 81. A plugin for GIMP as well as an online service 82. Available online at http://www.sellner.org/wercator/ 83. Units

Several hundreds are available, distributed under different eras (historic sets)

84. At first, choosing among ready-made ones is more than enough. The unit list for v1.8 is athttp://www.wesnoth.org/units/1.8/C/mainline.html 85. To create new units, tutorials are available athttp://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Art_Tutorials 86. In the newer versions of Wesnoth, multi-frame animations, shadows, different view angles etc are used, making unit design quite complex 87. Wesnoth Markup Language

Rather similar to XML

88. Tags written in the form of[tag] 89. A typical scenario consists of

Various metadata in the beginning

90. Storytelling part explaining the situation 91. Map data (can be included, but is typically linked) 92. Day/night cycle and difficulty specifications 93. Prestart part (definitions of sides, objectives etc) 94. Event-based buildup for the scenario 95. WML...

Can be very simple, but allows for really complex operations (changing units and terrain on the fly e.g. a character can bemagically turned into a monster or a cave wall may open under a spell or password; events may also depend on if a character from a previous scenario is alive etc etc)

96. Teaches good structure (opening and closing tags, correct use of parameters) as well as 'the big picture' (campaign level) 97. An example

A demo campaign I started to develop some time ago

98. A crazy story involving a lot of famous characters from various tales and also some celebrity-based people (including three Danish robbers Caspar, Jesper & Jonathan, Tchapai & Petka, Matti the mage (and former ski-jumper), Chuck Norris, King Toomas Hendrik, Santa Claus, and a very undead Osama) 99. Will gradually feature more complicated techniques, the 2 existing scenarios are quite simple 100. Final words

Hackers and playful cleverness fit well into academic settings

101. Wesnoth is a versatile tool for teaching a number of things 102. People can do marvellous things when not hindered by stupid artificial obstacles 103. Taking the fun seriously can result in a serious result without losing the fun factor :) 104. Additional recommended reading: http://wiki.kakupesa.net/index.php/The_Playful_Cleverness_Reading_List 105. Thanks! The slides are available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license at http://www.slideshare.net/UncleOwl