Randy Connolly Blog

This May I gave a talk on BlackBerries and iPods for the College’s Faculty Professional Development retreat in Banff. Unlike the typical presentation at a conference, in which you are limited to about 20-25 minutes, I was given a generous 60 minutes, which allowed for significantly more audience participation and discussion, and thus was quite enjoyable for myself.

The two technologies were discussed somewhat separately. The focus of the Blackberry part of the presentation was the idea that this type of device allows for the withdrawal from co-present interactions to engage in technologically-mediated communication via these devices.
One of my on-going research focuses has been technologies that allow an engagment with remote others while at the same time disengaging with those nearby.

The focus of the iPod portion of the presentation was on the way that iPods are used as a way of inhabiting the spaces that people move between. Using anthropologist Marc Auge’s idea of “ordeals of solitude” in non-places (spaces without meaning formed in relation to certains ends such as transport and commerce), I argued that iPods provide a way of aestheticizing the spaces their users move through and thus help them cope with an underwhelming environment.

In an era where there is more and more routine, always-the-same time spent in non-places (such as when commuting), the iPod provides a way of deroutinizing time. The iPod (and to a lesser extent, the Blackberry as well) increases both the ability to achieve (and the desire of its users for) accompanied solitude.

Richard Sennett argued that during the 20th century transportation revolution:

“individual bodies moving through urban space gradually became detached from the space in which they moved, and from the people the space contained. As space becomes devalued through motion, individuals gradually lost a sense of sharing fate with others.”

My worry is that the iPod and the Blackberry will continue this process of detachment from the public places that connect us to others and to our common histories. The history of modern communication and transportation technologies is that of a gradual retreat away from public places to that of the private consumption of goods. As users become immersed in their own sound and communicative bubbles, the significant spaces they habitually pass through and inhabit may increasingly lose significance for them and progressively turn into the non-places of daily life.

There was over 80 slides in this presentation, so I’ve included just a few here.

[View with PicLens]

Presentations, Research

Beside the cruise ship in Nassau

I’m back from the 2007 Microsoft Academic Game Days in Computer Science Education. This was certainly the most enjoyable conference I’ve ever attended. The first morning of the conference was in Orlando; the remainder was aboard a Disney Cruise Ship travelling to the Bahamas and back. I was delivering a paper (one of twenty selected) so Microsoft paid for my airfare and accommodation.

The main focus of the conference was not on the academics but more on convincing the academics on using Microsoft technology in their courses. In particular, they were really pushing the new XNA Framework.

Nonetheless, the conference was a lot of fun. Initially, I was a little worried as I found out that I had to share a room with another conference participant. It actually worked out quite well as my room-mate, Greg Wadley, was an interesting professor from University of Melbourne, and was also delivering a paper.

The great thing about having a conference aboard a cruise ship is that you could almost always find someone to talk with. In a regular multi-day conference, at the end of the day, everyone disappears (to their hotels, to bars, to parties, to sightsee). But aboard the ship, there weren’t a lot of places for the conference participants to disappear.

At any rate, the ship travelled first to Nassau, where we had two or three hours to explore. The next morning we arrived at Castaway Cay, Disney’s private island in the Bahamas. Unfortunately, most of the academic papers (including my own) were scheduled for this day, so I was only about to spend about three hours enjoying the sea and sun.

[View with PicLens]

Research, Travel

This is the title of a paper I’m delivering at the 2007 Microsoft Academic Days. The focus for this year’s conference is Game Development in Computer Science Education. This paper describes how game development can be used to successfully teach design patterns to undergraduate computer science students.

Abstract

This paper describes how game development can be used to successfully teach design patterns to undergraduate computer science students. The abstract nature of design patterns can make them difficult for students to fully comprehend and successfully integrate into their applications. The familiarity of games along with their flexibility provides an ideal context for making the abstract patterns more concrete and understandable. Three different game projects are described along with several of the design patterns implemented within these games.

Introduction

"The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns."
– Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan’s assertion about a revulsion against patterns may indeed have been true when he wrote those words in the early 1960s, but they very much appear to be false when it comes to contemporary thinking in software design. Since 1995, the software design field has been great enhanced by a burgeoning literature in the area of software design patterns. This literature very much tends to be oriented towards the experienced software development practitioner. Less experienced developers, such as undergraduate computer science students, generally however find design patterns to be too abstract and their development experience too limited to find the same joy and attraction to patterns. We might say then that students very often do in fact have a sense of revulsion against the patterns that are imposed by their instructors!

A design pattern is a description of a class-level solution to a common generalized design problem. In the key text in the field, the so-called Gang of Four book, 23 patterns are described at a relatively abstract level and are related using examples which are usually unfamiliar to typical student readers. Other authors have endeavored to teach design patterns by using more approachable language and examples.

Yet despite these much more approachable texts, this author has often struggled to find appropriate contexts and examples for teaching design patterns. Students typically were able to parrot the description of the covered patterns in examinations but generally struggled to implement them and almost always completely failed to see the point of these patterns. (It should be noted that some researchers in contrast have had some success introducing design patterns into entry-level CS courses). To this author’s students, design patterns almost always seemed an unnecessary and painful complication. Students often solved a problem their own way and then tried at the last moment to hammer the square peg of the design pattern into the round hole of their solution after it was already working. It is no wonder then that the students often felt a revulsion against design patterns. This experience, however, changed quite substantially once design patterns were taught using game development projects.

This paper describes the author’s relatively successful experiences teaching revulsion-free design patterns to third-year undergraduate students by using game development projects. It provides an overview of these games and then illustrates some of the design patterns that were introduced as solution mechanisms within these projects.

Games, Programming, Research, Writing