After winning the "German Developer Award 2011" we are still deeply impressed by the upcoming events: Ludwig and ovos got nominated for the "learning without frontiers"-Award.

learning without frontiers, a global platform (the headquarter is in London), nominates us in the category "Secondary Innovation" and we would be deeply honored to win the award on January 26th. But for that, we need your vote!

Please vote here until January 21th and share the link on your favored social networks. Thanks!

Have you met TED?

25 years ago the first TED-conference took place ... a legendary idea was born. Die greatest thinker and outrider of our time (as the TED-website says) get invited to talk about their ideas and concerns ... for 18 minutes at most. Those talks get filmed and will be published online on TED.com and can be shared through all the social networks. The slogan of TED: Ideas worth spreading.

learn to play

Here's a video of Joergs talk ... we hope you like it!

In 2010 I had my first Games4change experience at the Festival in New York. It was an easy choice to be back for this years 8^th Annual Games for change Festival, but comparing 2010 with 2011 reveals not only the huge step Games4change made, but also how Serious Games developed as a genre. Al Gore coined this in his keynote saying “Games are the new normal.”

The discussion on games addressing serious issues has obviously broadened, the topic has more coverage and - perhaps most important - exposure beyond gamers. This became visible at the festival and is very helpful and well deserved for the whole movement and all the people involved.

I was very excited to present our game on physics called Ludwig at this year´s Festival.
It was part of the Demo Spotlight which was hosted by Eric Zimmerman. The demo spotlight gave game developers the opportunity to present their projects on the main stage to the following critics:

Frank Lantz, Creative Director and co-Founder of area/code, Interim Director, NYU Game Center
Connie Yowell, Director of Education for U.S. Programs at the MacArthur Foundation
Ken Perlin, Professor of Computer Science, NYU Media Research Lab, and Director, Games for Learning Institute

The feedback - I want to thank jury and audience for their inputs - was really great and will give us an additional energy boost for the final production phase.  (My presentation starts at 21:15 sec)

My three favorite presentations from the festival:

Jesse Schell, Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University and Owner at Schell Games delivered a impassioned closing keynote entitled “Make Games, not war”. I loved it!

Gabe Newell, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Valve Corporation, gave a keynote during the Games for Learning Day.

He showcased Portal2 and introduced the game saying :

“There seems to be a distinction between games that are good for Education and games that are going to be commercially successful. I am not sure if I am going to buy into that.”

I could not agree more.

Nick Fortugno, Game Designer and Co-Founder, Playmatics gave a quick presentation on "Zen and the art of Serious Play". It was a wonderful Showcase on a well-known and world-wide played game we did not consider a Serious Game: Basketball. It was an insightful and highly inspiring talk, I hope to get the slides soon to show them here.

I enjoyed the company of interesting, like-minded people and want to give a big shout-out to Michelle Byrd, Asi Burak and the whole G4C team for the great organization! I will certainly be in New York for Games4change 2012.

The Project is lead by the Danube University Krems, Department of "Applied Game Studies" in partnership with the University of Graz, Didactics of Physics and ovos.

Abstract:

playful learning!

Research on motivational aspects and knowledge transfer in digital educational games for children aged 10 to 14 years. 

Current research on serious games allows only little inference about the optimization of knowledge transfer. To fill this gap we develop a research scenario to study motivation and knowledge transfer factors in educational games for children from 10 to 14. Our game “Ludwig” is an interactive learning game built around a serious topic: renewable energy. It is developed within an iterative didactic design approach developed by Wagner (2009). The development process is following three primary principles of game play: freedom to learn from errors, freedom to experiment, and freedom to make an effort (Osterweil, 2007). Empirical research with both focus- and expert groups will be part of this first application. This new design approach allows a scientific discussion of our results, the development of our empiric methods is influenced by the transfer model of Jürgen Fritz (2003). A mixed-method-design with different quantitative and qualitative methods will provide a validation of our scientific insights. 

Students and teachers are asked to join the project from the very beginning (conception stage). They will frequently give their inputs in various playtesting sessions during the whole didactic design process. The teacher’s inputs are used to evaluate different aspects of applicability in class. Based on the inputs of students and teachers, we develop the gaming objects and a research prototype. The student’s inputs strongly influence the progress of Ludwig and therefore the outcome as well as the quality of the research project. To allow the students to be aware of the whole research process, they will get feedback on how the findings of the test-settings are implemented in the development process of the gaming objects and the research prototype.

Imagine! was a conference organised by the OECD (CELE, Center for Effective Learning Environments and CERI, Center for Educational Research and Innovation), the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture, and Vienna University of Technology. It presented radical visions for tomorrow's schools and discussed the key factors that make them work, ranging from innovative design solutions to financing and procurement strategies.

The conference took place at the wonderful Kuppelsaal at the Vienna University of Technology (which is a 3 min walk away from my office) September 20th - 22nd 2010. I liked the international and interdisciplinary line up (list of Speakers and Workshop Facilitators), most of the talks and panels were pretty interesting for me since they brought a lot of insights from teachers, planners and educational institutions around the world.

Christian Kühn asked me to co-facilitate the workshop"Expanding Virtually" together with David Istance from the OECD. The Workshop was about investigating non-physical (which i like better than virtual) learning environments:

We have been waiting for the virtual world to transform education for more than a decade. In reality, in most schools computers and digital white boards have been added to the existing infrastructure but what evidence have we seen of change? Has ICT been integrated into our existing styles of teaching and learning? Or are we still at the beginning of a revolution? What will the influence of new patterns of social interaction through ICT be on the program and layout of the buildings we use for education? Might we end up in a world without schools?

It was a new experience to host a workshop where most of the participants were A) older than me and B) teachers. The world cafe format implied a lot of rotation among the participants and turned out to be challenging for me since it was neccessary to introduce all new and visiting participants on the topic and the challenging scenario. Find a video of the workshop here.

I wished we had more time to dig deeper into the possibilities and challenges of digital learning environments, but I met people I am in touch since and left the conference with a lot of inspiration for theEducational Game we are currently working on. 

After another great talk on Publishing paradigms by Alan Gershenfeld and a panel on top 10 mistakes people make in the field of funding, deisng, pr, funding, production and assessment I learned a lot about how to make and publish Serious Games and the conference attendance already paid off for me. (I wrote down all points and printed them and pinned them up in the office)

Both Future of Digital Media Talks, a format which started by mini talks of the Participants (7-10 mins) and ended in a Discussion with the Audience. I wished Katie Salen would have talked longer about Quest2learn, a school whose curriculum organized around games and digital culture she founded. I think she really hits the nerve when saying things like "We wanted to make a social network where kids could make a ton of mistakes" or "games are a great medium to teach children how systems work". I really look forward to see her again at the F.R.O.G. Conference this September in Vienna.

She was also recently profiled in the Moments of Genius series.

Nick Bilton, the Lead Technology Writer/Reporter for The New York Times and author of the Bits Blog showed great slides on Research he did for the NYT. He also had a message for those who claim that our brains are not "designed" to play computer games "Our brains were not designed to read 5.000 years ago" and the one who need a Laparoscopic Surgeon "get a gamer".

Day 3 (Festival day 2) was equally interesting, find a most-things-covering Blog here.

The conference is rather small, I was as far as I know the only austrian among about 400 delegates. The programme was pretty promising and I can safely say now that it left me everything but disappointed.

The first highlight was Media Molecules (the Makers of Little Big Planet) talk on Learning & Little Big Planet. I particulary loved to get a glimpse into their approach to make a game inspired by Lego ("Basically it´s just blocks, very approachable and friendly"). Another impressive talk was given later by Alice Taylor, the Commissioning Editor for Education at Channel 4.

My personal Favorite as for many others was the talk of Matt Mason, Author of the Pirate´s Dilemma, I loved his talk from the first slide on saying "Talent borrows, genius steals", a quote by Oscar Wilde. Meanwhile I bought his book on Amazon although it is available for free on the web which proofs him right I guess.

The first day closed for me with a not very well organised speed dating on potential partnerships and fundings. At the second and final day I had set up a couple of meetings before I watched the talk of Sara de Frietas, Research Director at the Serious Games Institute presenting latest research and findings in the area of serious games. Justin Bovington, CEO of  Rivers Run Red gave the following talk on the need to develop application for games and virtual worlds within the business environment.

Jesse Schell, Professor of Entertainment Technology gave his closing talk when I was already on my way to Heathrow. 

Altogether GBL 10 was a great experience, you can find more than 20 hours of Video material here. I am looking forward to GBL11 on March 28-30th in Brighton!

Our Onlinegame was planned and realised for the summer caimpaign of  Saturn in order to involve people with the Brand in an engaging and fun way. During a period of about 6 weeks about 100.000 Users slammed fridges.

The project "Saturnator" won Silver in the category "WE18 Integrierte Kampagnen". You can still play the game here or watch the TV Spots.

According to to European Travel Commission 20% of all Tourists are Teenagers or Students.
My Study and diploma thesis dealing with this target group was recently published.

Find the book on Amazon.