What are our kids learning these days? Sitting in classrooms playing with their iPods, spending more time on Facebook than paying attention in class… why aren’t they engaged with the learning!!!

If you often find yourself pondering the above, it sounds like you should have come to BETT conference last week and seen what the future of Better education technology is! It’s the place where UK teachers visit to pick up what they hope will be the best software, hardware and technology for teaching the British Curriculum.

Since Thought Den started attending, way back in 2009, there has been a paradigm shift in the how the crowds experience most of the new programs;  screen based clicking has been replaced with touch screens, and learners no longer crowd around one PC game but each have their own tablet device. The advent of surface computing has been another exciting concept at BETT.

This year more companies are picking up on mobile apps, remote learning and preparing equipment for every student to have a smartphone or tablet to learn with.

It’s becoming more about making use of the wealth of available technology. Children are bringing devices in naturally, so rather than telling them to switch it off, let’s engage them with learning using the tech they understand!

Importantly this year as we’ll be looking at some heavy changes in the ICT Curriculum. State Education is realising the importance of teaching learners about the inners of the software they’re creating and the circuits of the computer they’re working on.  Children should be taught that they are masters of the devices, rather than a slaves to them, and that they don’t have to be constrained by the available software but can create whatever they can think of with the wonders of programming.

With such a selection of products I really don’t envy any teachers making decisions for what to spend their budget on. The iPad is a new invention and only two years old, the 3D printer is only really making a breakthrough into affordability and the app store still has nappies on.

Everything is so young. And probably still about to be replaced in the next two years again.

So, what were my best and worst bits of BETT this year?

Cool BETT

NAO, the logic robot that teaches learners to start playing with programming – made by http://aldebaran-robotics.com/

Safe BETT

A certificate in Safe Social Networking – www.digitalme.co.uk/safe

Best BETT

An Award winning suite for learning on multiple devices: tablets, iPads – www.ko-su.co.uk

Technology Master BETT

Understanding the innards of DVD Readers, Routers, Scanners… the lot! – www.labtech.org

I BETT you need to learn some more…

There were more apostrophes missing again this year, even from some BETT signs!

Thank you BETT, we’re looking forward to 2013 already.

Before the clocks went back (and with thanks to our friend @LouiseDowne, previously of Tate) I attended a conference in London called Games For Brands; I won a free hour for effort! All in all, an interesting event if you’re interested in games. And pigeons.

The event was attended by the great and good in playful production (Preloaded, Mother, Hide & Seek, 4T2 and AKQA to name a few) and some incredibly experienced commissioners from the BBC, Channel 4, Tate, Wellcome Trust, Stardoll and EMI.

More interestingly, though, were the representatives from all kinds of brands, institutions and enterprises looking to level up and get their game on. Was it surprising BAE Systems were along for the ride? Or a chap from HSBC? Don’t McLaren Automotive have their hands full making cars go fast round corners? And what does gaming have to do with selling seats on Virgin Atlantic? A surprising amount, as it turns out, because like it or not, we’re entering the era of gamification (surely there is a prettier, less cynical word?)

Gamifi-what?

LinkedIn introduced a feature a few years back that had a profound effect on site engagement. Did anyone else feel press-ganged into completing their LinkedIn profile because of that bastard progress bar? Or even worse : “The fastest person to register today did it in 14 seconds. Can you beat it?” I’ll beat it alright!! **smashes keyboard into monitor**

Nicholas Lovell from Gamesbrief remarked that any parent is painfully familiar with gamification techniques – How quickly can you get into your pyjamas? If you eat one mouthful of broccoli you can watch Nickelodeon for four and a half hours. Etc. Play is an obvious motivator and brands are seriously looking at ways of harnessing this. Product placement in consoles for example. Or custom-built viral games like Fire Kills and Swamp Drifter from the Den. But it’s much more than that…

A fine example

The finest example I took from the event was Star Player, by AKQA for Heineken. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of using their Champions League “watch with mother” app, the top level aim was to capture the tension, immediacy and community-spirit of watching live at the stands and put this in the hands of the casual home-viewer. And boy did they nail it. Andy Hood’s illuminative breakdown made it look easy.
His top tips: Understand your subject and your audience down the most granular level, build core functionality, then iterate. Obvious really…
Favourite feature : hit the ‘Goal Now’ button and if a team scores within 30 seconds you get a squillion points.
Interesting point : the system is 100% manual, requiring a team of expert football and gaming fans to mange match events as they unfold, thus creating live gamable data for home-viewers.

A final rundown

Brief round up of other awesome stuff from the event :
Ville Heijari from Rovio (Angry Birds) said it all started with the characters – initial game mechanics were far too complex. So rather than get people addicted, they wanted players to love their characters and rewarded them with a rich, distinctive look and feel.
Jo Twist from Channel 4 Education hasn’t yet worked out what to call immersive content environments that aren’t games. Playful systems of content is pretty catchy, right? Plus she was ‘gamed’ into replying to people on OKCupid after realising she had the ‘Badge of Death’ for never replying…
Robin from PLAStudios recognised that games can’t be ripped like music can and they offer a connection with the artist that fans are looking for.The new LP sleeve for today’s gamers? Play his great annoyingly addictive game for Blink 182 here get182.com
Tom Chatfield was full of insights and it’s worth following his twitterings. He talked about the challenge of hard play (the mastery needed to complete Portal 2) and the delight of easy play (chucking a shiny bird at evil pigs)
Good and bad of gamification : Giff Gaff incentivised their customers with cash-money to provide support to other customers! Klout is rubbish, and easy to cheat, and has loads of annoying alerts and badge-awards you can’t skip.

Conference summary as a poster!

Beautifully designed by our pigeon-loving intern Abi and curated by other folks at Thought Den from the #games4brands Twitter feed, it features the top 10 tweets of the day laid out for your inspiration – download it here

It was great to see the Tate team and hear more about the game they’re launching with Preloaded, all about neuroscience and Alice in Wonderland…read more on that over at Preloaded’s house. Download our lovely poster!

Hi, it’s me, Dan Course, Co-founder and Technical Director here at Thought Den. That’s me on left. Hi! This week I’ve been lucky enough to begin mentoring a group of four College lads from St Brendens in Brislington as a part of the Bristol Young Talent Awards.

Our team’s project is to promote Bristol’s BloodHound Project with an app created with the AppFurnace platform (another Bristol thorough bred).

In making the promotional app, the students will receive training in Project Management from Everything Everywhere (T-mobile & Orange), Presentation skills from BBC and Work Attire from Cribbs Causeway.

The awards seem to have hit a national and local nerve. Businesses have offered cash prizes, coverage and one company have put forward a fully paid apprenticeship for one lucky student. I’ll be keeping you updated with how our group’s going over the next 6 months.

Big thanks this week to Evoke Marketing Group and Sony Playstation 3 for inviting us to an “exclusive ticketed event at Motion, Bristol”, where they were showcasing some currently un-released Playstation3 titles.

We wheeled up on last Thursday evening and entered into a real gamers electronic wet dream (dangerous, that). The club was kitted out with comfy sofas, a free bar, a DJ and MAHUSSIVE HD screens attached to shiny games consoles, free for anyone to mooch on over and play!

So in we trot, eyes glinting and super ready to be bamboozled by mind-bending challenges mixed with fancy graphics and some of the best games the goliath of Sony could throw at us.

But… while the staff at the event were great ambassadors for gaming, geeing you on with silly chat and mini-competitions, I’m afraid I felt these “unreleased games” would stay better being unreleased for a while.

Playing on the console they were unresponsive, unnatural and failed to make me care about the character. It’s odd; that companies with so much gaming heritage can miss out on a few simple pillars of game design.

While I don’t presume to understand the complexity of design of a PS3 game, it just felt there were a few playful basics missing:

RESPONSIVE CONTROLS

Players don’t want to feel cheated by their character when controls repeatedly don’t react naturally. Play Booty Juggler!

NARRATIVE

Games need to have a reason, we like ones with playful learning. To be honest though. we’ve all played enough First Person Shooters and puzzle games, they now need something better than ‘just shoot baddies’ to keep me playing. Play Artist Rooms!

GAMEPLAY FIRST

..fancy graphics later. Play Fire Kills!

The games we were playing were: FIFA12, GoldenEye, Uncharted 3 and Resistance 3.

So thanks Playstation, but I think I’ll be sticking to lots of other games for the time being.

Views expressed are entirely Dan’s, so there.

Last weekend about twenty of Bristol’s finest game designers, developers and associated talents sweated blood, sweat and more sweat (the PMStudio is WARM) at Bristol’s leg of the Explay Game Jam. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the games jam, let me elucidate the rules slightly in a dramatic film style….

24 hours. One theme.  Some people. Their mission: make a game.

That’s about it really. No stifling rules on programming language, group size, games mechanics or the like. The games don’t have to be screen based, and the attendees don’t have to be in the games industry. What results is a rather lovely hodge-podge of talents, working styles, crazy ideas and heavy drinking.

Arriving on Friday evening, after a brief round of “I am X, I do Y and my favourite game is Dragon Ball Z” (not originally a game, but the pun doesn’t work otherwise, pedant) we split off into teams. The two Thought Denners in attendance, Technical Director Dan Course and Studio Manager/misc George Rowe were two facets of ‘Team Disco’, a six headed hydra also including sound designer/father Owen, film maker/Mohawk enthusiast Sy, script writer/games designer/sarcasm aficionado James and illustrator/dinosaur impersonator Nat (who also wrote a blog post about this).

Team Disco in full effect: misc, sound, develop, film, program and draw

Ben Rhinehart of Mutant Labs, who are part-organisers of the Explay festival, then proclaimed the Jam’s theme to be ‘mirror’. While we reflected on this (ho-ho) we were also treated to the first of Jam’s amazing meals, a home cooked Indian feast.

Curry + beer = ideas

Much post curry brain storming ensued, with different coloured pens and post it notes in full effect, and after a couple of hours of solid synapse bashing we had whittled our ideas down to a streamlined game of disco themed British Bulldog with Medusa and vampires which happened in a temporal cycle of light and dark, with a dating element that also used Chat Roulette and AR…

We quickly adjourned to the pub before our idea got anymore out of hand, where we discovered another team were working on EXACTLY the same idea (well, it had Medusa in it). What to do?

Saturday dawned, and we discovered James had been up all night with our idea spelled out in scrabble pieces, a common practice in the game script writing paradigm. Fortunately, it turned out that our original idea was an exact anagram of ‘turn-based game that’s a bit like Frogger with bugs, but they have mirrors and are being attacked by an angry kid with a magnifying glass’. Who knew?

The place was starting to look like a morning at Thought Den

With the final idea down on paper, another amazing meal, and late comer George arriving with a mirror ball, the stage was set for some serious game creation action. James and Dan cracked on with creating the game in Unity (which Dan had never used before), while Nat started drawing some lovingly detailed bugs and Owen attempted to create the loudest laser/klaxon noise he possibly could. Film maker Sy decided to document the whole game creation process and managed to create a great five minute snapshot of the event:

What was the resulting product? Well, I think Nat described it very well in her blog post on the day:

You are a bug trying to reach the discarded sandwich, but a kid with a magnifying glass stands between you and the gingham paradise, trying to fry you to a crisp (with an entertaining fizzling sound, thanks Owen) It’s a tactical multiplayer, each turn a player moves forward a small distance and positions their mirror anywhere in a circular radius around them, once all the players have moved you hit a button and the kid with the magnifying glass randomly spawns and sends out a ray of sunshine-death which can either hit a bug directly or bounce off another bug’s mirror and potentially hit a rival. The first to the sandwich wins.

It’s not exactly ready for release, but what do you expect in one day? We had a lot of fun making it! You can play it here: http://us.thoughtden.co.uk/GamesJam/

Some quote highlights from Team Disco:

“But I supplied the graphics to you beautifully?”
“Yes, but what YOU fail to remember is that I am massively incompetent”

“Guys, you know how our game is like Frogger but with bugs? Would anyone be offended if we call it Bugger?” [Bugger was later contracted to Buggr to make it well currentz]

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Our rival teams created some fantastic little games in their time. Team Mirrornaut created ‘Mirrornaut’, a side scrolling 8-bit platformer programmed in C Sharp. It’s a bit like Canabalt but with a button to swap to a mirror image of the level. The character also looks like he has an awesome afro, though I think that is just the Team Disco influence and it’s actually a helmet. The graphics are really cool, as is Nick Dymond’s soundtrack, and the whole game is very polished.

Team ‘Late’, as they were dubbed in the DropBox race to the finish, decided to show off and create two games in the 24 hours. One was an iOS app for two players created in GameSalad, based on reading mirror images of words, and could quite easily have been submitted to the app store at the end and gone on to international acclaim. Their second game was a 3D affair, where you play Jason (of Argonauts fame) who must fend off the deadly gaze of loads of attacking gorgons; it left us both awe-struck and a little scared of David from Echoic’s “Medusa, give me back my fleece!” sound effects (though I don’t think they remember the story of the myth quite correctly!)

The Bristol Game Jam was a fantastic event, and we met a lot of great people who do and love similar things to ourselves. A massive thank you has to go to Debbie Connor and Tomas Rawlings of Aurochs digital for their hard work in organising the Jam, everybody who attended and contributed, Korash, Ben and Ella from Explay, Debbie’s neighbour for the amazing food and Lethal Bizzle for providing the post jam entertainment (seriously).