| Team
Steve Grand, A-Life expert
Nick Mackie, Character Designer, Aardman Animation
NESTA Futurelab: Jo Morrison,
Teresa Dillon, Mary Ulicsak,
Jon Frost, Peter Ferne, Andrew Milton
Technology
Simulation engine capable of real-time modelling of large
creature populations.
Distributed network architecture which supports:
- each organisation hosting their own region of the
world
- perception and movement of creatures between regions
in the wild
- a security model which allows autonomous organisations
to safely share their resources.
Extensible rendering architecture which provides:
- real-time high quality 3D views of individual creatures
and the dynamics of creature populations
- the ability to view creatures on a variety of devices
including mobile phones and handhelds.
Comprehensive toolset including:
- a ‘sandbox’ to allow private experimentation
with creatures before releasing them into the wild
- beginner and expert tools for building your own creatures
- the ability to ‘view source’ to enable
people to see how any creature in the world is made.
Outline
The Create-a-Creature concept is a large-scale educational
software application for schools. The idea is to construct
a vast, internet-based virtual world containing an ecosystem
of thousands of semi-intelligent artificial life forms.
Children will be able to create their own creatures and
let them loose in this world. They can study their creature’s
progress in order to learn about ecology, creature behaviour
and other biological topics, while at the same time strengthening
their ability to reason scientifically and gaining experience
in modern ‘systems’ concepts such as Complexity
and Chaos.
Children will be able to enter the world in school, as part
of a lesson facilitated by a teacher, and at home as a location
for play and experimentation. NESTA Futurelab believes this
project’s cross-curricular, creativity-focused approach
will have a significant impact on educational methodology
in the UK and beyond.
Learning research objectives
In this project, NESTA Futurelab is interested in finding
out:
- Whether it is possible to create a character (creature)
based environment sufficiently engaging to encourage self-motivated
play at home, while being a rich enough resource for the
develop-ment of systems thinking and scientific understanding
in the classroom.
- Whether a rich game-based learning resource is capable
of being ‘staged’ in such a way that younger
learners can gain easy entry to the game, while older learners
can still be challenged and engaged in order to create
a ‘spiral’ curriculum.
As with all NESTA Futurelab prototypes, we are also interested
in:
- What this project tells us about the best ways of designing
educational digital resources.
- What this project tells us about how learning processes
can be transformed through use of these tools.
- How this project helps us to understand the potential
of next generation technologies to create intrinsically
motivating and engaging learning experiences.
Research and development process
To date the concept has been developed through a series of
workshops, with children and with industry experts. The
launch workshop brought Aardman Animation together with
Lionhead Productions, the Open University, Artificial Life
(A-Life) specialists and the NESTA Futurelab team to discuss
the notion of A-Life creatures existing in a massive online
virtual world.
A series of intensive workshops led by NESTA Futurelab has
followed, with the idea, character development, technical
specification and requirements issues being further developed
by the Create A Creature team. Discussions with teachers
and LEA policy advisors have helped to make the concept more
robust, and more workshops with children are planned in the
near future.
Findings
To date NESTA Futurelab has worked with a small sample of 25
young people (13-15 year-olds) within community and specialist
technology centres, discussing with them the concepts and types
of creatures and habitats the application could provide. This
early research suggests that the young people were motivated
and engaged by the subject and entered into discussions about
the biological, social and psychological nature of their creatures
and habits. However, the workshops identified numerous misunderstandings
that young people have about the nature of existence, which
suggests a need to develop a tool that addresses and supports
young people’s thinking about life, existence, complexity
and chaos. This early work also suggests that such a tool could
potentially support cross-disciplinary and systematic thinking.
Next steps
The next steps
for the project are currently structured around pedagogic,
technology and content development issues and will comprise:
- A period of research and development in which an A-Life
programmer and animators can come together to discuss the possibilities
of creating an environ-ment that is aesthetically pleasing
but sufficiently complex and emergent.
- Primary investigations about what kinds of technologies
would be needed to run the system – what online, offline,
mobile etc resources would users need to run the system both
at home and in school.
- Investigating the development of a working prototype.
Contacts
NESTA Futurelab: Jo Morrison
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