#8BITMOOC

Let's program like it's 1985.

[8bitmooc]

I created a game in the Ludum Dare 48-hour game compo! I wrote it all from scratch using #8bitmooc, and I only used the documentation that I put in the help pages, without referring to the NESDev wiki! I found a few bugs in my emulator and my assembler as a result, and had plenty of fun!

[8bitmooc]

The Commodore 64 in 64 minutes.

[8bitmooc]

The Challenges with Challenges

These past few days, I've been working on the auto-graded assignments for #8bitmooc. I've managed to get three out of the nine assignments done, two of the easy ones (doing controller input and drawing sprites) and one of the hard ones (Game of Life).

So far, each of these has taken about eight hours to work on each, since I first have to develop the game around the solution I want students to develop, and then I have to solve it myself. After writing a solution (to make sure it's solvable and not insanely tedious) I come up with acceptance tests and then make sure my solution passes those. However, since I haven't had the opportunity to actually test my emulator, I end up using this experience to debug my emulator, and I've found some particularly horrifying bugs. Luckily the emulator I've written is only looking at a subset of the architecture, but the last thing I want to happen is for a student to make a working solution and then wonder why they aren't getting credit for it.

One thing I've been grappling with lately is this notion of "speed". Whenever you get a correct solution, you are scored on how small and fast your program is. The size is easy to deal with, since it's just a ROM. But the speed is another matter - how do I decide how fast your program went? Do I have a single test case for speed? Or do I average the speed across all of the test cases?  I'm leaning towards the average approach, since it seems the most fair, but I'm still on the lookout for a better idea.

The reason I'm working so quickly is because I have a workshop on NES programming coming up in Atlanta, GA next week, and I really want to use #8bitmooc as my environment. This weekend, I'm going to be doing a few more autograded exercises and bringing up the quality on some of the wiki pages - especially the pages on the hardware and memory mapped registers. The tutorial has been put on hold for the time being, since I'm questioning some of its utility (especially since there are very few interactive segments, it's basically a written lecture). Sometimes I feel like I need very concise reference pages, but I really want the help center to be highly conversational with an approachable reading level.

[8bitmooc]

Progress Update and Radio Silence

Hello everyone! Long time no post! I've been working on other projects this summer (namely the ones that keep the bills paid and food on the table) so #8bitmooc has been suffering from some radio silence. However, big things have been happening lately!

New Interface

I've recently overhauled and streamlined the user interface for the website to make it much more efficient for students to see where they are in the class. I've also decided to do away with logging in and out and offload that to Github instead so that Github can deal with account verification and whatnot - I just use them for logging in. This should help since it will not only make my life easier, I would like - at some point - to make it possible to publish your NES games to Github from #8bitmooc. I think that would be pretty awesome, since it would hopefully encourage more programming in the future. :)

Even though it seems like a waste of time to be redoing the interface when I should be working on content, I simply can't keep my thoughts straight when I'm not happy with the interface. By redoing the interface, I become happier, and that encourages me to keep working on other things, such as the course content!

An In-Person Version

At one point, I considered doing a podcast or something to have some sort of verbal interaction with the course content. Even if there aren't that many students, talking things out is therapeutic and helps me think about what I want folks to get out of this course. However, I thought that an even better way to help me evaluate my process would be to hold an informal, in-person version of #8bitmooc. So I was thinking that I could take over a classroom one day a week on campus and see who I could get to come to attend an in-person work session around the content. I could record the interaction, and use it as an opportunity to answer questions about the content.

The only problem with this plan is that I would need more time to publicize the course. Granted, I've been doing a pretty sorry job of publicizing if I want the course to go live in September, but I feel like that's not a big deal, since I should probably have a smaller "MOOC" before trying to cast a large net.

Design Changes

I've made a lot of design decisions lately around simplifying what I'm trying to do. I've scrapped the entire levels and experience points system of the course in favor of the much simpler "gamification" that I enjoyed when I took my assembly course. I feel like the high score board that motivates students to optimize their solutions does a good enough job of requiring students to explore the language space, so I shouldn't have to add arbitrary experience points on top of that. While it complicates my message board system (I was really looking forward to the level-locked message boards), I feel like this puts less cognitive load on the user, leaving more mental capacity for actually engaging in the course content.

I'm going to start working on the challenges now - I've got them drafted, but I need to try to solve them myself before I'll be happy trying to make others do them. Also, I'm giving a workshop on NES programming in two weeks, so I'm hoping to use #8bitmooc as a demo platform for this purpose.

[8bitmooc]

http://boingboing.net/2013/08/01/marriage-proposal-by-way-of-a.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

It's been a while since I've posted anything. #8bitmooc is almost done!

[8bitmooc]

Discussions in #8bitmooc

For the next 23 hours, #moocmooc is in full swing again. We recently came across the issue of discussion forums, something that I've been wanting to address in #8bitmooc.

As we know, in #8bitmooc, I had the problem of trying to figure out why students would want to get experience points and gain levels. Originally it was a secondary thing that students could do while completing the course, but now I've turned the experience points and the levels into the grade itself. Once you reach Level 8, you pass. That's it. If you've worked enough to get that many points, you've either decided you care enough to learn the material, or you are so concerned with gaming the system you won't care no matter what we do. :)

So the first gating comes from the challenges. As you get to the higher levels, you unlock harder challenges and more opportunities to get more experience points. This is obvious, but I want to do something else - something tangible, without arbitrarily affecting the games that they can make.

Then I had it - as students gain levels, they unlock new forums that are only accessible to students who have also reached those levels. Part of the problem of discussion forums is the signal-to-noise ratio, where newbies are in all of the forums, drowning out the posts with redundant posts that disrupt deeper conversations you see on hobbyist forums that do quite well. By locking out forums based on levels, you won't have anyone in the thread about the affordances and limitations of the 4-bit sprite format who hasn't at least learned the basics of how the sprite format works. The point of #8bitmooc is to try it, and then discuss it.

Also, there's even a "Level 8" forum for the alumni of the course to stick together after they pass and move on!

The hope is that by gating the forums and trimming the noise, there will be people who are genuinely interested in a deep discussion about the content who won't be scared away from participating. I would love for students to be able to get experience points for deep discussions as much as shiny games, so maybe this is the first step to that goal.

[8bitmooc]

Progress Report

What's stopping #8bitmooc from getting done? Let's take a look at the Issue Tracker... most of the things here have to do with infrastructure stuff.

Need a way for teachers to grade Game Jam submissions! Game Jams are a very important part of #8bitmooc. Once students get finished with the introductory material, the only way to really get through the course is by making games of their own. Game jams are worth 1000 XP each, so it's very important that they get graded correctly.

Create a way for students to get experience points for their posts on the forum (I have a really basic one right now, but it's not very flexible).

As for content, which is even more important...

"Hello world!" tutorial series - a series of readings and lecture videos about how to make games for the NES. I've gotten started on this, but it needs some work, especially since this is the tutorial series for newbies.

I need to actually make the autograded challenges, which means I need to make some games that partially work that I can break out subroutines for students to complete.

I need to make some sprites for the aforementioned games. :/

Finish the rest of the Wiki.

It's so much easier to do infrastructure than content. :/

[nopemaeda-deactivated20131115]

Pong

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[8bitmooc]

Gender diversity in retro games.

[8bitmooc]

Spoilers!

Recently I've been devoting my attention to the "help pages" pseudo-wiki for the course. #8bitmooc is entirely challenge-driven, meaning that rather than the lecture videos telling students how to complete the challenges that immediately follow them, the challenges tell the students what needs to be done, and the students turn to the help pages to figure out how to complete them. I've written a help page for every opcode and all of the status registers on the 6502, and moving on to do the assembler directives and memory map for the NES directly.

The reason for this is that when it comes to programming, the ability to get information from a help page or spec sheet is extremely important. This helps contextualize the features of the language without looking at them artificially in isolation. On the other hand, I feel like it's extremely irresponsible to simply write a reference document and expect students to learn anything from that. I'm trying to strike a balance between inspiring students to think about the possibilities available through the NES and getting them to uncover these capabilities on their own through the challenges. The last thing I want to do is connect the lecture videos to the challenges, since that conflates the purpose of the tutorials.

So what I've decided to do as a compromise is develop a series of pages in the help center alongside the reference. It's proven to be very difficult to keep to "just the facts" while writing these pages - I find myself going off on tangents about all the possible uses of particular opcodes rather than offloading those to their own pages (like discussing all the ways you can use the stack in the opcode page for PHA). This will allow me to develop my Tutorial as I need to, and then link back to reference pages for deeper reading if necessary. Students get nice video lectures, without having the challenges spoiled for them. Everybody wins. :)

You know, I don't know why I thought I could make a MOOC while getting away from doing the content. I spent the last four months building the infrastructure, so this part had to be done sooner or later, right?

[8bitmooc]

Retro Gaming With Raspberry Pi - Slashdot

coop0030 writes "Thanks to the affordable Raspberry Pi and some clever software, anyone can re-create the classic arcade experience at home. Adafruit brings the genuine 'clicky' arcade controls, you bring the game files and a little crafting skill to build it. Classic game emulation used to require...

[8bitmooc]

Powered by OpenShift!

If there's one thing I have to accept as true, it's that whether my MOOC draws 10000 people or 100, I can't support them on a box in my apartment. I have two choices - either try to host it at NC State (which comes with its own can of worms) or find an external solution (even if it involves me paying for it).

OpenShift is an open source platform-as-a-service solution from Red Hat that allows you to put a web app powered by Rails or Django online, usually for the purposes of prototyping. I've been hosting #8bitmooc on Openshift for about two months at learn.8bitmooc.org, and so far it's been treating me well.

The OpenShift development workflow is actually super easy, since it's basically powered by Git. Each openshift app has a git repo that you push your code to, and after each push, it restarts and reloads your application with your new changes ready to go. Since I've migrated my entire life to Github, this lowers the barrier to entry for me substantially - just set up a 'remote production' pointing to your openshift app and push to it to see everything unfold automagically. I was able to create an account and get #8bitmooc running in just under six hours, and it's survived through two live demos so far. Not bad, right?

That being said, this may only be temporary solution. It's good enough for testing, but Openshift only gives you a gigabyte of storage for free, which will quickly get exhausted from the data collection I'm doing. If I can't secure a grant to pay for the service, I might be able to pull off a kickstarter or something of that nature.

[8bitmooc]

What will I do with this blog when #8bitmooc is done?

The front page of #8bitmooc features an RSS reader that pulls from this tumblelog and displays all of the nonsense I write about here. So I've been wondering... how do I continue having an informal space where I talk about #8bitmooc while also providing important news to my students?

One idea I've been tossing around in my head came from the Virginia Tech Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy that came from a session on an interdisciplinary course on... not kidding... zombies. Bringing together an all-star team of profs from different disciplines, they came together to teach their students about literature, psychology, and literature about zombies. While #8bitmooc won't have zombies (probably), the one feature that made that class really stand out was their weekly zombie podcast, where the students got a candid look at their professors geeking out over how zombies had to do with their various specialties.

Wouldn't it be awesome to do a podcast or google hangout every week or so for #8bitmooc? Part of the beauty of the flipped classroom is that professors aren't spending their time in the classroom going over routine material. Normally, we talk about how that opens the classroom up for working out examples. But it also opens up time for the professor to talk about the things he or she is really passionate about! Since #8bitmooc is completely automated, having a personal blog like this or a podcast that talks about whatever I happen to be thinking about the NES at any given moment shows that there is a human leading this class. The exercises can cover the technical content, while the podcast can look at the more humanities-related content, and students can even earn experience points for partaking in the discussion on the forums or on Twitter!

Right now, most of this blog is related to the development and research of #8bitmooc, but I would love to re-focus it towards more NES-specific content and discussion later on. Right now, "my students" (if I even have any) probably just care about what I'm doing and when the class starts. I can start talking about course content after that milestone.

I am so excited about this project. Does anyone have any ideas of their own?

[8bitmooc]

Some thoughts about your forum post, here because commenting is weirdly broken. I would recommend a few things, firstly that if you limit the votes per day you don't tell the users. Let them vote all they want, but only count the first X, or distribute X points among Y votes evenly, so people who vote a TON don't get more weight than other people. Also, go ahead and store all individual votes. It isn't that costly and you might want the data later.

LOL @ Tumblr commenting.

The reason why I'm limiting the votes per day is to emulate the slashdot modpoints curation system. I want for people who vote a lot to have more sway, because I want to encourage community moderation. The reason for giving the advanced students more votes is based on the understanding that if they're sticking with the course long enough to pass it, they are statistically less likely to be trolls and be taking the course seriously.

Hiding how I'm limiting their actions in the course goes against the transparent philosophy I'm trying to get across. I want everything in the course to be expected. Not to mention the source code is available, so someone will probably reveal it at some point after reading the code. :)

I like the idea of distributing the points and using a "floating point" score. That's pretty clever. Each time you vote, you diminish your voting power.

I still "store" the votes in a logging system for data, but I would imagine that it's costly to do a count on a many-to-many relationship for every comment on the thread.

Thanks for your comments!

[8bitmooc]

"Like" this post!

One essential part to making a successful online community is enabling the community to curate content on its own. When there is a massive contributor base, the least you can do to facilitate this is to enable something as basic as "liking" and "unliking" posts.

My idea:

A student can only upvote/downvote 'X' posts each day, where 'X' is her level.

A student can not upvote/downvote her own posts.

TAs can upvote/downvote as many posts as they like

Students can upvote/downvote the same post multiple times.

Why am I doing this? Why don't I just keep track of who liked which posts? I would, but that gets very expensive, very quickly, since it has to keep track of the ID for the user and the comment every time something is liked, and that takes a tremendous amount of database space. Having that detailed information is not particularly interesting, and it slows down rendering the forum/games. This also gives a tangible value to having a higher level, as it gives them more influence in the community as they master the content.

Thoughts?

[8bitmooc]

Progression in #8bitmooc

"Welcome to #8bitmooc. You all have an F".

This is my take on the introduction to the Multiplayer Classroom,

#8bitmooc works like an RPG. Every student begins at level 1, and reaches new levels every 100*(level**2) experience points. As students gain levels, they unlock new course content as well as new abilities they can take advantage of in the course.

There are three main ways to gain experience points in the class. The first is by doing clearly defined "challenges". These include the traditional autograded programming assignments, as well as 'achievements' that students can win by doing things in the playground or project editors. Students can also gain challenge experience by submitting the projects they work on to game jams like One Game a Month and Ludum Dare.

The second approach comes from helping out other students. Students can ask questions on the message board (I decided to just go ahead and make one) as well as by helping with more targeted SOS requests, and the helpful students are rewarded for helping their peers out. I also really want to create a system where students can create learning content such as videos and worked out examples and earn points for that, to demonstrate the "learning by teaching" approach.

The third approach comes from doing projects, which I believe is the most authentic way to learn how to program. Unlike the game library in the original #8bitmooc, the new incarnation features an almost Github-like project management system that allows students to work together on large projects. Students are encouraged to publish these large projects in the forums and students get experience points as other students provide feedback and "like" the project. This will require manual grading, but students who demonstrate the ability to plan a project and see it through to completion show just as much learning as someone who completes all the autograded assignments.

When students gain levels, they unlock new challenges up until they reach level 10, when the final challenge is revealed: create a game, on your own, with some certain requirements. Students submit their game to this project, just like a game jam, and both the source code and the final project are evaluated.

This pathway to completion shows how I value the ability to choose your own approach to demonstrate learning. Students are free to pick any one approach or mix all three together. This nonlinear growth path is much more gamelike than the directed acyclic graph used in Khan Academy (which is what my original vision for this system looked like).

Now that I've blogged about it, let's make it happen!

[8bitmooc]

#moocmoocbar

Last night, I had the pleasure of hanging out with @readywriting, @martinlugton, @jessifer, and @patlockley on a Google+ hangout called #moocmoocbar. For those of you who don't know, #moocmooc is a meta-, mini-, micro-, and (I guess) anti-MOOC where the question on everyone's mind is "how many times can we turn this idea of online education inside out and still pretend we know what we're doing."

Before the Bar actually started, Martin and I actually got to talk about #8bitmooc quite substantially. I revealed all of the blog entries left on my queue for this week and talked about some of the deeper ideas behind how my course takes the best from both cMOOCs and xMOOCs to make something insane out of it. Martin is a good person to know, I suppose, since he runs the Connectivist MOOCs directory that could definitely help give me some visibility. :)

Visibility was one of the many important questions we came up with while participating in the Bar, mostly dealing with this notion of the Superstar Professor that is so prevalent in MOOCs. One reason for the success of these online courses comes specifically from the legitimizing effect of having big-name universities behind them. After all, if a student takes a CS1 class from Stanford, that is obviously more valid than if they take a silly course in 8-bit video game programming from some plucky grad student from North Carolina who's taking way too long finishing his Ph.D. Isn't it?

Jesse said that despite "best practices" saying that in an online environment, the teacher should have a video of his or herself to help give the students a face to recognize, #moocmooc intentionally went against that "belief" saying that it shouldn't be about the professor - it should be about all of the students. If anything was fun about #moocmoocbar, it was that it reinforced the idea that a Google Hangout would be a great way to get my students on camera and talking for a weekly podcast! This fireside chat proved to be an excellent way to help demonstrate that at its heart, HybridPedagogy is a community, and that's pretty awesome.

In a way, #8bitmooc is very focused around building an online community rather than emphasizing video lectures. I discussed previously in my post on UI, emphasizing the development of actual games with classmates as well as the discussion of games and the game development process. All such paths are equally valid in my eyes towards "passing" #8bitmooc. But what's the best way to encourage discussion in a community? Forums (yuck)? Twitter? IRC? Smoke signals? These are all questions that I'll need to answer before I go off and code yet another Django forum. :)

[8bitmooc]

The Great #8bitmooc Refactoring

You know what isn't conducive to research? Whenever you take the project you've been working on for four months and completely change the scope and codebase of the project.

I've been working nearly 12 hours each day this week moving things around and getting them the way I like them. The past few blog entries made it look like I was just drawing pictures, but nope! I started a new branch of #8bitmooc and have changed just about everything.

I am much happier with it. :)

The previous incarnation of #8bitmooc wasn't very satisfying, because despite everything I said about gamification and exploration being key features in the MOOC I wanted to make, I was basically just reimplementing Udacity. That isn't very interesting, and I fundamentally disagree with the messages it sends to its students. My MOOC is definitely not going to be one where the system stuffs your face full of information for you - it will require a higher degree of attention and willingness to find information on your own, but there will still be a demonstrable pathway to growth. Whether you decide to grow by writing your own projects or by doing the exercises I provide, they all culminate in a final project that authentically measures the students' learning.

There are lots of quotes out there that take jabs at perfectionism: "done is better than perfect" being one of my favorites, but they are all based on the premise of perfectionists being unwilling to compromise. Compromise is a sticky subject - sometimes it's a good thing. Remember earlier in the #8bitmooc development process, I said that my willingness to drop the animated world map in favor of a menu was a compromise that helped me move on? Yes, that was a good one. However, if I were to compromise on my beliefs in a project-based and exploration-based learning MOOC, that would fly in the face of why I'm doing this project in the first place.

The best part is that most of the features, the sandbox and stuff, are still there, so I've been able to copy and paste most of the code I wrote for the original incarnation of #8bitmooc. Most of what I've rewritten is how I position the various features of the MOOC, and truly offer a non-linear approach to learning the content.