Spring Research Update

It's been a while since I last did a research update. With spring (sort of) arriving, there's no better time to reflect on a winter's worth of hard work.

First / Dean Gugler 

Coherent Emergent Stories

Most of my effort in the last 8 months has been dedicated to teaching, but despite this, I managed to make progress on my PhD and thesis project.  In the fall, I spent time putting together my thesis proposal, trying to make the content as close to final-thesis quality as I could.  Then I proposed in December.

Since then, I have been dabbling with a next-iteration prototype to test my story ideas.  Instead of trying to craft an entire game, I am focusing on what I call a "story explorer."  I am designing the prototype to be as data-driven as possible so I can quickly and easily test many different stories and approaches to arranging those stories with my story engine.

Gram's House

The Gram's House project is a labour of love, and I am so excited to see how far it has come since I came up with the idea years ago.

Lately we've been hard at work on the NSF AISL Pathways grant we were awarded to study the effect of story on teaching computer science concepts with games to middle school girls.  We have been working on prototypes for three analog games to be used in informal settings.  The game cover the concepts of data representation (specifically images), data organization (searching and sorting), and algorithms (writing and reading precise instructions).

It has been a lot of fun coming up with the game designs, but also very challenging.  I really want to make sure we have something more than a lightly gamified activity.  I want the games to have inherently interesting and motivating goals that happen to require understanding of our CS concepts to achieve.  I want the games to present interesting and meaningful choices to players, and have at least some degree of replayability.  I'm not sure that our current games have all these features, and I am convinced that we can come up with even better designs.  Hopefully our resident story and game design expert Lorraine Hopping will stay patient with my constant pushing, because she has been an amazing asset to this project and has a lot more experience than I do!

Something else exciting is that two of my first year students may be joining the procedural content generation grant team at Northeastern University in Boston this summer.  I am beyond thrilled to be able to enable this kind of opportunity, and I can't wait to see what they are able to accomplish.

In addition to the summary of Gram's House on my own webpage, we have started an official project site hosted by Northeastern.  We are still working on adding content, but that should be a good place to find information about the project in the future.