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Let’s start looking at games

Reminder: in case you’re behind on my blog, I’ve been researching programs to put on the old computers in the small library at the Deaf School in Kenya where I’m volunteering.  My intention is to come up with solutions that work here but can be applied elsewhere.  If nothing else, evaluating as many programs as possible will give me real examples of what works and what doesn’t.  Because the teachers are striking, I would otherwise be bored so I’ve been perusing the Internet a lot in order to make some progress on this front.  This is me in action:

P1020719 Today I will be starting a series of posts in which I focus on the differences between the various classic LucasArts adventure games, specifically as I assess their educational values for pre- and early readers.  I decided to start by looking at these games specifically because they let the player click on words to make rudimentary sentences, which I think is a great place to start.  They also have difficult logic puzzles.  They’re also sufficiently old, so they’re more likely to run on old computers, and at the time they came out, not all computers had sound, so I can safely assume that all text will appear on-screen, which is great for the sake of reading and even better when you consider the deaf audience.  I’ll be showing you a lot of pictures from the games, because the details can be hard to visualize.

As a disclaimer, I know that these games are not free.  Many of them have demo versions I could use in a pinch, which may be just as good if the children’s attention spans are short.  If I’m really sold on one as being “best” for learning then I’ll contact the copyright holder.

I’ll take you through the games chronologically because that’s the order that I’m playing them, and indicate the changes over time that helped or hurt the educational value.  After I’m finished with the later games I will share my conclusions, but please enjoy the process as it unfolds…

1987-1989: Maniac Mansion 1

I will probably be writing more about this game than the others in order to lay the groundwork for my assessment of the later ones, so bear with me.  Pictures below are used interchangeably from two different editions, one “Enhanced” with better graphics and one not, but they are educationally the same game except that the enhanced version allows up to ten saved games, whereas the original version allows one, which is not so good if multiple children want to play at different points in the game.  Someone other than myself has already documented the more minute changes in all the editions of these games.

maniac_008 In Maniac Mansion you control three different characters who you choose at the beginning.  One of them is “Michael,” a black college-age kid, which I like because, thanks to living in Kenya, I am hyper aware of how culturally skewed these things can normally be.

maniac_002Most of the time, you are in “action” mode, where you can click a verb on the bottom of the screen, then either a visual object or a word from your inventory.  In this case, I created the sentence “What is bushes,” which is an example of how this system can go wrong from a learning perspective.  Hopefully this example is an rare one… it seems easy enough to avoid plurals in gave development.

maniac_010 “Pull bushes,” which I used to reveal the grate behind them, is better, but this is not really proper grammar, either.  When playing the game, a special “computer command” grammar is unfortunately being reinforced, but as you can see from Michael’s observation about the grate being rusted (brown font, top of screen), there is enough reading elsewhere in the game that I don’t think harm will be done.

Another problem that these “verb-noun”-style games have is how to deal with nonsense input.  In this game, for instance, I can issue the command, “Close sign,” which of course makes no sense.  When I do this, the character states the generic dealing-with-nonsense reply, “That doesn’t seem to work.”

maniac_005 maniac_004

Having a lot of verbs to choose from, as this game does (14 total– “New kid” isn’t a verb, it’s a way to switch between the three characters), means that there is a lot of opportunity to create nonsense commands like this.  On the other hand, having all those verbs on the screen all the time, begging to be considered, is good vocab reinforcement.

The aforementioned “What is bushes,” though, actually elicited no response from the character, which is inconsistent and might be confusing to the kids.

maniac_007Also regarding the “action mode,” in terms of sentence building, I will point out that some verbs, namely “give,” “unlock,” “fix,” and sometimes “use,” require prepositional phrases after them, for example, “Unlock front door with key.”  The key was in my inventory, which is displayed as text below the verbs.  Even better vocab reinforcement!

The other mode of the game is fairly passive, and that is basically the “cutscene” mode, in which something uncontrollable happens and you as a viewer simply watch and read the dialogue.  There is no level of active participation here.

Okay, then, let’s look at one more game today, which will bring us into the 90s.

1988-1990: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Zak differs from Manic in only a few significant ways.

scummvm00001Firstly, you can only be Zak… no more choosing characters.  Secondly, the verbs are different.  There are still fourteen, but Unlock and Fix have been replaced with Put on and Take off.  Additionally, when in a store, Give and Pick up are replaced automatically with Sell and Buy, respectively.  The contextual verbs are a good feature because they introduces more words in total.

scummvm00002 Like Maniac Mansion, this game sports multiple editions.  The newer 1990 edition has more colors so it looks better, but it also allocates more room for the inventory items: instead of just four, up to six show at once.  This means more text on screen at any given time—a good thing from my perspective.

I worry about Zak’s initial appeal, if only because the game starts in a posh San Francisco apartment and stars a middle-aged white man, so the children may be less excited to get into it, even though from what I understand the adventure is pretty huge by the end.   Cutscenes seem to assume a faster reading speed as well, which means that slower readers may miss plot points.

The game still has all the same inherent problems as Maniac Mansion.  Overall, Zak would be a better tool for vocab, but only for the kids who can keep up with the faster dialogue.

Well, that’s it for today!  Seeing Zak McKracken in that last picture made me think of my trip to SF right before I left for Kenya.  Here’s a pic of my sis on the beach in front of the Golden Gate.  Sometimes I really miss my family!

P1020247

Categories
Mombasa

My criteria for learning programs

Well, I’ve been on my Internet downloading spree for a few days now, and a side effect of all that Internet usage is that I’ve changed around my SIM cards so I pay less, and therefore my phone number has changed, too.  If you intend on calling me, look in the right column to see the new info.

So what have I been downloading to try out for the school computers?  It’s all I’ve been focusing on recently, so let’s review.  On a conceptual level, I’ve been looking for the following attributes in games and applications that I think will appeal to children of various ages (not including children who just need to learn a specific program, like a word processor), with the ideal (not yet achieved) being that each program would possess all four attributes:

  • Teaches specific lessons, like multiplication, history, etc.
    • Many such games exist, and it’s difficult to sift through them all, especially with all the short, single-lesson Flash games out there.  Also, a lot of them are mind-numbingly bland.
  • Has a lot of (correct) English text in it
    • Many games and applications use icons and symbols.  Corresponding text would be incredibly helpful for pre and early readers.  On the low end, for the pre-readers, I like to see simple 1-to-1 correspondence between text and symbol.  On the high end, for the older kids, I like to see reading as integral to the game, not just story elements that can be skipped.  I see a lot of bad English in the smaller, single-developer games (for whom English is often not a first language), and in newer Flash games I see a lot of slang that might be unhelpful to the early readers.
  • Requires freeform sentence typing
    • This is a difficult one, especially because I’m assuming the computers have no Internet, but I think it’s really important to find an outlet for the children to write, as opposed to copy.  Writing assignments only keep a child busy for so long, but a program that keeps the child typing from memory for a long time would do wonders if it could be sustained.  I observe a few subcategories here:
      • Text adventure games (old or new), in which the player types simple commands like “look under the bridge,” or in the older games, “look bridge,” the latter of which is not helpful for building correct grammar skills.
      • Fake webcams, like Subservient Chicken, which are entertaining, although they are limited in scope and I’ve yet to see one that works offline.
      • Chatbots (For offline use I usually just find small, proof-of-concept 1-on-1 chat programs), although an interesting concept is the chatbot-in-game, in which the player converses with the computer-controlled characters (as opposed to typing commands like “talk to man”) in order to achieve something.  Again, hard to find offline, but I really want to try Starship Titanic, which you should really read about to understand.  It’s not free, so I’ll need to have it shipped here, but it sounds unique enough that it might be worth it.
      • Network chat (for students to chat with each other, either in a game or in an IM program)
  • Teaches logic, preferably complex puzzle/problem solving.  I haven’t really broken this down yet, but puzzles that are strictly visual are not sufficient in my opinion.  Many graphic adventure games require the player to remember past events, deduce solutions, as well as solve visual puzzles.

Of course, as mentioned before, I am also trying to download full CD images that contain such software on top of a freestanding operating system, but those are big downloads that are still running.

Note that I am bounding myself by the following constraints:

  • Everything should be free.
  • Everything must work on either Linux or Windows (and I mean it needs to work on original Win95 AND Vista, which is a good test for both very old and very new programs), even if it means running an emulator or installing other free software.  I expect problems on Win95 with Java and .NET apps.
  • Abandonware is only acceptable if game license ownership is truly not known.
  • Flash games that are downloaded with a browser must be freely available (not through a site subscription) and core functionality must be intact, even offline, with just the SWF file.
  • Nothing can have an Internet dependency.
  • Pentium (pre-MMX) must be able to run it.

The last two requirements hurt the most, and additionally I’m not sure which will programs will really fail on Win95.  I’ll need to get the actual computers set up to see.  The goal of having the children type freeform is hurt most by not having Internet, and I may eventually find a “killer app” that convinces me that learning will benefit tangibly and significantly from even a slow Internet connection.  We’ll see.

If two programs provide similar benefits and are both sufficiently engaging, I will pick the one that sits highest on this list:

  1. Open source with Windows and Linux binaries available
  2. Closed source but works on both platforms
  3. Open source but on just one platform
  4. Closed source on one platform

So there you have it, the method to my downloading madness.  Because this post had a lot of tech stuff in it, here’s a photo from this weekend of some matatu seats with a cool tech theme:

P1020714-bright