This blog gets 3* for fun and 4* for difficulty: Ratings in Gamestar Mechanic

Over the past few years I have put a couple of classes in Gamestar Mechanic, a video game about designing video games.  It is really quite an amazing tool, if you haven’t set your kid up for a free account just stop reading this blog and go and do it.  Anyways, in the game you get to be a designer and create your own sprite based video games.

As with most online games you gain experience by completing tasks.  Gamestar has 4 areas that you gain experience in: Designing Games, Playing Other People’s Games, Reviewing Games and Being a Good Citizen.  So, basically if you want to increase in level (your title) not only will you build games, but you will also play everyone else’s game. Win, win for everybody.

Except for some reason kids ruin it.  There used to be a category on the website for the highest rated games.

I first noticed it with my awesome game:  Mt. Sierpinski.  Based on a beautiful fractal, it is a pretty fun game! Ok, it is a pretty challenging game, but I was really excited because it was my first game featured on the Gamestar website.  This started getting me quite a few good reviews, people commenting that it was great, etc.  Then, my game started showing up on the top rated games page, and this is where it got weird.  The other people on the top rated page started to give me 1 star reviews, thus dropping my average score so that I would be below their game on the top rated page.  Of course, the longer you are on the top of the list, the more plays you have and the more immune you are to this kind of “attack.”

On the flip side, I now log in and play highly rated games that are really, really lousy.  How are they getting to be highly rated? They are trading 5 star reviews.  You rate my game five stars and I will rate your game five stars.  The game can be so simple and have no challenge, take 1 second to win, and they will still be rated 5 stars as long as my also, often equally simple game also gets five stars.

Since the game engine is designed to reward reviews, and reviews are inherently subjective, here is my question: When you put students into Gamestar Mechanic, what do you tell them about the rating process?  Do you tell them to do what the Gamestar designers want: honest, critical and helpful reviews? Or do you say nothing, and let them interact with the review ecosystem the way that it has evolved?  Which one will lead to a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the user rating system (like Yelp for instance).

My favourite set of reviews, just as an aside, was a student who was mad at me (because of an incident at recess, being caught doing something naughty is never fun). As revenge against the world of authority, this student gave every one of my games the worst possible rating.  I had a chuckle over that.  Especially since that made some of my other students rate the game so that the effect was undone, because I am a cool teacher.  Meaning by rating me poorly the student had actually increased my plays and my rating.

Which makes me wonder . . are any of the ratings valid at all?

Level Orange: How My Fitness Video Game, Teaching Recorder and a Spelling Unit Relate to Each Other

Did you ever see the program “Connections2” by James Burke?  Each episode would feature a meandering set of almost trivial things that brought together diverse elements from history.  He would prove that two seemingly unrelated ideas were completely dependent on each other, often in very unexpected ways. One of my favorites showed how hot pickles could be a historical starting point for the discovery and use of Neodymium lasers. This blog is a little like one of those shows.

I was working out, (Yes, mom, I do that now and then) using my new game, Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012, for Kinect X-Box 360.  (As an aside, I just learned that you can totally hook up the Kinect to a computer and program it with Scratch.  Now how awesome is that? )

Anyways, I was working out, using my new X-Box game.  I was getting badges for just about everything I did.  Congratulations . . .you input your weight!  I know you are supposed to have a feeling of success and all, especially at the start, but I think sometimes you should have to put some work into it. Maybe I was missing something that would make it more motivating. And this got me thinking about teaching students how to play the recorder.

When I was teaching recorder to elementary school students, I would give them a leveled book of music. Each book was a different color.  The students would practice their music, and they would come to me.  They could try once or twice a day to “pass” their recorder test.  If they played the song correctly they would get a coloured piece of string to tie around the recorded, roughly analogous to the belts in Karate.   The idea wasn’t mine, it was from Barb Philipak.  You can actually buy belts that are pretty awesome, but I just used coloured embroidery thread.  Everyone who ever uses this program finds it highly motivating for their students.  It says so on Barb’s book.

Yet, there were some students who were not successful in this environment of testing.  They didn’t like coming for tests, and they certainly didn’t accept failure (I mean, failing isn’t fun, is it?). There was one grade four boy who reframed the whole process in a very clever way.  He said, “Treat Mr. Martin like he is the boss from “Half Life 2”

Let’s leave alone for a moment that these 9 year olds were comparing a lesson in my music class to a violent video-game taking place in an imagined brutal police state somewhere in a dystopian future. You see, if I was a video game boss, and your work on your music is a level (a chapter in Half Life 2),  then your goal is to defeat me in a Recorder Battle. That re-framing of the role of testing was magical.  I would even ham up the test, speaking in my deep evil voice, “So, young music warrior, you think you will be able to get to the next level.  Do your worst. Mwahahahahaha.”  If a student didn’t make it they would say, “Oh, man.  I will so get that note right next time, evil music boss.”  No more depression, no more being despondent, and best of all, no more giving up if it didn’t work out the first few times.

I swear, for years after that astute observation I used the metaphor in every class.  Think of me as the boss in a video game.  You might not beat me the first time, or even the first ten times.  Each time you try to beat me and don’t you will get a little bit closer to getting it right.  It worked for learning to play recorder.  It even worked for teaching Algebra!

And this reminds me of spelling.

I created an online shell for advanced spellers.  It is loosely based on the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but at its heart was just a love of words.  And some really nasty spelling tests.  Like NASTY with extra NAST.  Like syzygy or flibbertigibbet.  Like a spelling bee, you would have to spell the word even though you had probably not seen the word before.  The students that were involved in this unit enjoyed it, but they were moving through it very slowly.  So when one girl (let’s call her Mary) received a score of 100% on her “Really Hard Words with a French Origin” test I developed a cunning plan. I made a really nice webpage at the front of the unit.  It said: “Wall of Exceptional High Scores.”  Then there was a line and in really fancy letters I wrote: “Mary, Master French Etmologist, 1^st Rank.” This had a very interesting effect on the little group.  First, they figured out that if they got perfect on the test they would get a title and their name on the front page.  Then they figured out that the rankings were first come first serve.  If you wanted to be 1^st rank you had to be the first one to get 100%.  This little idea, stolen from games, also proved to be highly motivating.

This idea became so successful that for a few years I used it in the classroom.  You could be: Geographer and Cartographer Marty, Master of Algebra, Creator of 5 Haiku, Honoured Sink Cleaner.  You had to be really committed to cleaning a sink to get the title of Honoured Sink Cleaner, let me tell you. And, so nobody felt left out, everyone could get titles and some titles were extremely easy to earn.  I even had the title “online security specialist” for students who changed their server password at some point in the year.

This brings me to my Fitness Game, which is trying to motivate me by giving me statistics and badges and all of that good stuff, every time I take a breath.  But I need a wall of fame to share it on.  So, since I have this blog, why not share it here?

Orange Fitness level is quite an accomplishment!  It means I burned 100 calories playing a video game today!

See, I feel more motivated already. And admit it.  You kinda want to be on my wall too.

S. Martin

PS:  The game will share this information on Facebook, but it isn’t the same without the fancy text.  Which I made at Cooltext.com.

Snicker Snack – Debugging

We had been working on programming in class for several weeks, groups of students, designing games.  Although the process had had some hiccoughs, overall I thought things were going really well.  There were a couple of groups that were struggling, but they were working on some fairly difficult games, so it was to be expected.  Still, three days before spring break I received an email from a concerned parent.  The contents of the letter surprised me.

The parent wrote that her daughter was struggling with the Scratch project. Her partner had gone on vacation and she was finding the program very hard to do.  Scratch was a mystery to this student, she didn’t understand what she was doing, the program was confusing and her mom, dad and older brother didn’t know anything about programming so they couldn’t help her.   There were tears at home, and on days that we were going to do Scratch she was saying that she didn’t want to go to school.  For this particular student, that was a major surprise, she loved school and she loved being in my class.  I was devastated, how had I missed someone struggling so much?  And what was causing this frustration?

In problem solving and debugging, even I get frustrated to know end and I know that sometimes you have to leave something for a while, work on something else and come back to it.  But I also know that you go back, figure out the problem or design a new solution, and then it works and you feel that rush of excitement, that feeling of “Oh, yeah.  I’m the boss of this computer. I figured it out!”  I believe, as a strong piece of my practice that it is the feeling of mastery over the idea that gives you the glow.  It takes perseverance. Sometimes it takes a nudge a well timed nudge from a teacher.

So I emailed the mom back, and asked if my student could bring her lunch to meet with me and one of her friends and we would take a look at her program and see where she was.  Two days later, our lunch meeting happened and I looked at her game.  It involved a grid of 9 lily pads, and moving ladybugs.  The game is from http://www.mathfair.com/puzzles.html.

This is the game that the girl was programming. She had leaves instead of circles, but it was this idea.

She was trying to program the bugs so that when she clicked on them, if they could they would move to the empty space (in her game they were leaves, not circles) and if they couldn’t they would just stay still. Her body language and her description of her problem left no doubt that she was done with this programming thing, that it was too hard, and she wasn’t up to the task.

It is tricky series of conditional statements, (could and would are not my favourites either) but she had already worked out variables.  The idea that she was missing was that the empty space had to change from “empty” to “full” and the empty space needed to change from “full” to “empty.”  She was working alone though, and didn’t have that social aspect that can help with problem solving, she wasn’t able to talk it out with a partner.

Her confidence for problem solving through this bug was pretty low, so I took a hand and worked on the script for one ladybug.  We clicked on the ladybug. I let her talk me through her variables, heaped a ton of praise and made a few quick scripting decisions. We clicked on the ladybug I was editing.  It moved to the empty space.  We clicked on the same ladybug and it went to the previously empty space.  She had done all of the hard work, she just needed to throw a few broadcast commands in to tell her “leaves” if they were empty or full.  This command had to be specific to the leaf, which meant the ladybug script had to know where it was and where it was going.

“The vorpal blade went Snicker-Snack,” as Lewis Carol might say, and our ladybug’s bug was dead.  She immediately saw what needed to be done and her enthusiasm returned.  She spent all lunch hour working on her game with her friend.  In the afternoon I changed my plan to allow students to choose to work on their Scratch project.  When some of the students saw her program working, they skipped right over asking me for help and went straight to her.  She was the new expert, and even the boys who considered themselves “Scratch experts” were marvelling at the programming scripts she created.  They asked her questions and she could answer.  She was brimming with confidence and some students thought that she might be the best programmer in the room.

I felt that we had covered the problem, fixed her issue, and got her back on track.  Confidence restored, teacher mission accomplished.  So I was surprised when that evening I received another email from the mom, with the ominous subject, “Another Scratch Problem.”  What could that be?  The message was: “I don’t know what you did today, but you are a miracle worker.  My daughter is so excited and happy about her Scratch project and she is constantly showing it off.  I have another problem with Scratch though.  Now she is working on her project so intently, I can’t get her off the computer and into bed!”

Now, that is a problem that is worth hearing about!