Judith Good talked on ‘Learning and motivational affordances in narrative-based game authoring’. Judith http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/judithg/index.html had written her paper with Judy Robertson http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~judyr/ They’d thought in detail about why kids enjoy programming computer games, and why they are prepared to put substantially more time and effort into this than into most school subjects.

They run games design workshops using Neverwinter Nights. In fact, they put together a very rudeimentary game on the spot: desert scene, populated by a penguin. Player’s character goes up to the penguin and says ‘hello’, penguin says ‘I’m hot’. I told Jacob about this simple scenario and he was fascinated, so much som that I’ve had to go and buy Neverwinter Nights, so that he can have a go. I think he wants to program a game about a turtle.

Anyway, they come up with lots of reasons why games design appeals: immediate feedback, gradual learning curve, immediate results. Worth following up some of their earlier research, I think.

John Yearwood talked about ‘Interactive narrative by thematic connection of dramatic situations’. Given his material, I think he could have come up with a more user-friendly title. He described an approach to generating interactive narrative in a computer game by using an argument-based structure to work out the next event in the language sequence.

He used Polti’s 36 dramatic situations to help with  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations In brief, Polti’s situations are a more detailed version of the view that there are only six plots in the world. One of his situations, for example, is the Daring Enterprise, which requires a bold leader, an object and an adversary.

I was interested in how many times this idea of codifying the narrative format came up during the conference and also in how often this conference seemed to focus on gaming.

After this, Rui Figueiredo talked about an interactive video developed as part of an anti-bullying project. Seemed an immense amount of programming work for very little reward.

Joseph South looked at videos for teaching students English. He showed how standard videos tend to have rather creepy people addressing each other in very formal language and showed how a story-based video showing more realistic interaction is more helpful.

Relates this to situated learning: ‘knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context and culture in which it is developed and used.’ ‘Language makes little real sense if you don’t understand how it interacts with the culture in which it is inevitably embedded.’

Paul’s in KMI http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/paulm/ but his interests don’t appear to overlap with mine. What I found most interesting about his talk was his summary of a narrative plan in one of his pieces of research. First, theme introduction provides characters, props, scenery and anything else needed for the narrative. Second, Conflict Introduction introduces a problem. Third, Conflict Resolution presents attempts to solve the conflict, the last of which is successful. Fourth, Post Completion, wraps up the narrative. A fifth, Comic, section, can be inserted pretty much anywhere.

This structured look at narrative tied in with what Michael Young had been saying the previous day. It’s interesting to see narrative formalised in this way, to see the skeleton around which so many stories are built. It also tied win with the work on the Royal Mile where I was wondering what makes a narrative memorable. Does it need to contain conflict to be memorable?

Why the weird picture at the top of this posting? Paul was researching ‘Tiny Planets’ and looking at narrative structure within episodes.

Agneta Bostom http://www.chemistrynarratives.com/research.html gave a very interesting talk on ‘How narrative from lived experience facilitate learning in chemistry’. Lots of the science students she spoke to felt there was no place for storytelling in chemistry but them told stories which explained their interest in chemistry or in certain aspects of it. Made me think of Primo Levi’s ‘Periodic Table’, a book of stories related to chemical elements.

Laura Korte http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0235396/ talked about how students learn about programming by designing games. Did seem a fun way of learning.

The next paper was produced by a student who then went off to Greece, leaving her supervisor to present it. It described a largely unsuccessful and, in many ways, misconceived piece of research. As even the writer of the paper wasn’t interested enough to come and hear it, I’m not sure why we had to sit through it. (Though, I must say, her supervisor was a very good presenter and managed to shape a fairly pointless paper into an interesting talk).

The research was on an interactive enviornment. Could it be used to encourage imaginative writing? The short answer was no. But, to investigate this, primary school children were split into three groups. The first stayed inthe classroom as a control group and did imaginative writing as pr usual. The second went to the research centre, where they had pretty much the same lesson as in the classroom. The third went to the research centre, had the interactive experience and then did the imaginative writing. To prevent the other groups getting jealous, this group was sworn to secrecy about what they had been doing. How ethical is that?

Also, the interactive envioronment made one of the kids throw up. Probably a fitting response to the whole project.

Kirsten Price talked on ‘Narratives in New Zealand schools: a radical experiment’. She introduced an interesting DVD but the links with narratives felt tenuous.

Harry Brenton is at Imperial and talked about ‘teaching dynamic medical processes using medical representations’ which was good but out of my field. Did make me think about how we understand and process information in different ways depending on how it is presented.

Rose Luckin’s paper was ‘When the NINF came home: guiding parents and children in the co-construction of narratives linking home and school learning’. This is based on a project where tablet PCs moved between home and school, giving parents a better idea of what was going on in school. I must say I didn’t warm to it as a project. Perhpas because I’m not convinced of the virtues of getting primary school kids to schlep tablet PCs round with them. Perhaps because I found the interface too irritating, perhaps because it’s pushing the school into the home. I think when you’re at primary school you should be able to switch off and play when you get home, not spend hours going through your day with your parents.