Today's ESUG Video is "An Educational Role Playing Game" by Mathias. Rouan - here's the abstract:

An interdisciplinary team developed a multi-agent system on Ouessant, an island concerned with shrub encroachment. The main goals were firstly to understand former vegetation dynamics and secondly to represent the main actors' view of natural resources and their dynamics in relation to their own practices. The management strategies established for each type of stakeholder were then formalized and the impact of these strategies on biodiversity was measured on various time and spatial scales. In order to discuss the first outputs of the modelling process with the local stakeholders and get new inputs on their behaviour in relation to shrub encroachment, an adapted model was jointly developed by the researchers and the Regional park (Gourmelon et al., 2008) as a support to a role-playing game (RPG). In addition, the team is considering the option of developing an educational adapted role-playing game designed by the ABM co-modelling network and playable with a wide range of public visiting the Oceanopolis aquarium in Brest. This role-playing game will multiply the discussions with various stakeholders, and provide new inputs to the ABM model or generate a new set of scenarios. These are part of the current and future research to be developed by opening the team to the educational community . Possible demonstration of the RPG : This adapted RPG coupling CORMAS (a simulation platform based on the VisualWorks programming environment which allows the development of applications in the object-oriented programming language Smalltalk) and wireless touch screen peripheral is actually under development but will be completed this summer. A live demonstration will might be possible during the conference.

You can get the slides for the talk here.

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Technorati Tags: smalltalk, educational rpg, brest, france, esug09