Play to Learn to Play

From the staff point of view a reading week gives us the chance to keep our head above water! To prepare for the last half of the semester, complete tasks that have been on hold for 5 weeks and for our school to schedule meetings and yet more tasks. This week I have been programming an XNA flocking example for my final years – finished it more quickly than expected. I’m calling the demo “Dancing on Mice” as it has a cat controlled by a player that feels like its skating due to the forces modelled in the simulation. The cat chases flocking mice (or rather cheese! because I couldn’t find a good mice animation!). Doing this reminds me of two things: one that you need to program algorithms from scratch in order to get a good understanding of them, and two that to be a good game designer you need to test your ideas in practice with a complete game.

This week I’m also trying to finish fixing a BJET hournal paper and read a PhD thesis for a viva (I’m internal examiner on an image processing PhD). Opps! I have a exam paper to write for 2nd years that is a few weeks late. Tomorrow I have a full day of placement job practice interviews. No pressure in my job at all

The student view of a reading week seems to be that it’s a holiday! Perhaps a few see it as an opportunity to do coursework.

Therese and I presented papers at the European Game Based Learning conference this week. We felt that our presentations went well enough and explained our work clearly. We had a number of good conversations with researchers who were interested in what we were doing and I really enjoyed chatting to a couple of researchers from France who were on the same research wavelength as myself. Hopefully, I can maintain links with these guys and take the education virtual world RPG ideas forward. EGBL 2009 had a mixed quality of presentations but was well worth the trip for the conections made.