Bayes Academy Development Reports 1-2

Posted on Dec 18, 2014 in Blog, English Posts | 0 comments

I’m finally making real progress with my academy game instead of just planning. I’ve posted two development reports on Less Wrong: Bayes Academy: Development report 1 Bayes Academy Development Report 2 – improved data visualization Feedback is welcome, either here or over there. The source code is up on GitHub. Share this:TweetShare on...

Bayesian academy game: A core mechanic

Posted on Jan 8, 2014 in Blog, English Posts | 3 comments

I feel like my progress with my academy game has been frustratingly slow. Lots of natural language, little code. Over Christmas leave I finally put together a simple Bayes net and belief propagation implementation, but when I was about to move on to start actually implementing the game side of things, I realized that some of the things that I had planned didn’t quite work after all. Then I...

Bayesian academy game: Some game mechanics

Posted on Dec 6, 2013 in English Posts | 9 comments

So far I have spoken about the possibility of edugames being good, sketched out the basic idea of an edugame built around Bayesian networks, and outlined some design constraints. Now it’s finally the time to get to the actual meat of the matter – the game mechanics. Note that everything here is subject to change. I’m aiming to outline things to a sufficient level of detail that I have a...

Bayesian academy game: Constraints

Posted on Dec 1, 2013 in English Posts | 5 comments

My work on my Master’s thesis and the Bayesian academy game was temporarily interrupted when I had to focus on finishing the work I had piled up for another course. Now I’m slowly trying to get back into the flow, so here’s a post on some of the things that I’ll be trying to keep in mind while creating the game, and which should help shape its design. This post is still somewhat abstract:...

Towards meaningfully gamifying Bayesian Networks, or, just what can you do with them

Posted on Oct 23, 2013 in English Essays, English Posts | 5 comments

In my previous article, I argued that educational games could be good if they implemented their educational content in a meaningful way. This means making the player actually use the educational material to predict the possible consequences of different choices within the game, in such a manner that the choices will have both short- and long-term consequences. More specifically, I talked about my...

Teaching Bayesian networks by means of social scheming, or, why edugames don’t have to suck

Posted on Oct 16, 2013 in English Essays, English Posts | 6 comments

As a part of my Master’s thesis in Computer Science, I am designing a game which seeks to teach its players a subfield of math known as Bayesian networks, hopefully in a fun and enjoyable way. This post explains some of the basic design and educational philosophy behind the game, and will hopefully also convince you that educational games don’t have to suck. I will start by discussing a...