Today I was lucky enough to attend the EiS IT 16 Conference which had keynote speakers, hands-on workshops and a choice of electives. I had been fortunate enough to attend the BETT Show earlier this year but this was a chance for a more relaxed and calmer approach to computing rather than the rush to see everything in the intensity of the BETT weekend.

The Conference started off with a brief introductory message from the event organiser which was followed by a keynote speech by Tim Rylands, who went through a myriad of ways to engage pupils through the use of many (free) tools, apps and resources to engage them in the topic of animals , although any topic could use the resources shown. I came away full of ideas and inspired.

BBC Micro:Bit

The next session I went to was my favourite; a hands-on session with the BBC Micro:Bit, the small easily programmable device which is being provided, free of charge, to every year 7 school pupil in England. The session only lasted 40 or so minutes but in that time I was able to easily programme the LED lights, create a simple animation and scroll a message to playfully insult a colleague.... wonderful!

After a short break I attended a session about coding and how to show progression in coding through the use of tools such as Kodable, Scratch Jr and Tickle on the iPad. This was an excellent session as it allowed me to think about our current practice at school and think about how we could use programmable robots and drones to help show pupils how coding works with real world examples

The second keynote looked at the strategies and practices of a variety of case-study schools in their implementation of mobile digital devices. It threw up a lot of questions but mostly spoke about how ownership of the object was important for the pupils to get out of it and also how mobile device use should be integrated into daily practice instead of sporadically.

The final elective I chose was with Tim Rylands again and concerned using video games to inspire games based learning. I found it interesting and satisfying going into this quick 30 minute session as I had been par of the Redbridge Gaming Network for several years and in that time we had used numerous games as a contextual hub for learning. On this website I have discussed and shown how I have used Endless Ocean, Limbo and numerous other games to get the children inspired to write. It was great to see one of the originators of the idea speak.

Overall the conference was a great event and even though I could be more verbose and thorough of my review, it is late and I am fasting tomorrow so I have kept this brief. If you get a chance to go, please do as it is well worth it... even just to network and share good practise.

With E3 over and the next generation of consoles imminent, the message being trotted out is that more photo-realistic games will lead to more emotional connections between players and the onscreen characters. Christoph Hartman, boss of 2K Games said

“To dramatically change the industry to where we can insert a whole range of emotions, I feel it will only happen when we reach the point that games are photorealistic; then we will have reached an endpoint and that might be the final console."

The theory that if the computer characters looks more realistic then more emotions will be elicited from the player is a fallacy in my opinion. Humans can elicit emotions through other means. Music, art and animation can all touch us individually. Take the claymation Frankenweenie which is a beautifully created animation that shows the relationship between a young boy and his dog. When the dog dies and the boy mourns his loss it really is touching. Even though the characters portrayed in the film are not photorealistic but merely clay models, I felt more of a connection to Victor (the young boy in Frankenweenie) than any number of 80’s action hero films starring real people. In part this was due to the well crafted characterization and storytelling but it was also due to the cinematography, music and dialogue.

Frankenweenie, a beautiful film which will make many a grown man cry... including this one!

Scott McCloud in his seminal work ‘Understanding Comics’ wrote about the ‘Power of Abstraction’. This is the idea that simplicity is great as you project yourself onto the character. To help you understand his concept look at the image below which simply outlines his idea.

Projecting ourselves according to Scott McCloud

In my opinion, photorealism in games is not important to elicit emotion; books can do it through description and illustrations, art through use of colour and composition. We don’t need the uncanny valley like Polar Express, but we need pathos and humanity like the dead colossi in Shadow of the Colossus or the mysterious figures in Journey. In my opinion there was more emotion in Toy Story 3 than in Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within because the characters were more relatable even though the Final Fantasy people looked more human!

Tom Hanks looked scary in the Polar Express, the uncanny valley strikes again!

For games great developers know that a great game begins with a great vision and the technology is only a means to achieving that vision, never an end in itself. Game technology can express a story without a game getting in the way, but through interaction games can add to a sense of involvement in the world.

Hidetaka Miyazaki, the Game Director at From Software has said that,