Josep Valls-Vargas

Towards story-based content generation: From plot-points to maps

Some computer game genres require meaningful stories and complex worlds in order to successfully engage players. In this paper we look at a procedural approach to story-based map generation focusing on the tight relationship between stories and the virtual worlds where those stories will unfold. Our long term goal is to develop procedural content generation techniques that can produce maps supporting multiple stories. We present an approach that takes, as input, the specification of a story space as a collection of plot points. Causal relations between these plot points and spatial relationships between locations define different story and spatial structures. Our system generates multiple configurations of a map, determines the stories that are actually supported in each map, and evaluates their quality, in order to find maps that support high quality stories from a storytelling perspective.

Towards balancing learner autonomy and pedagogical process in educational games

We present the preliminary work in the TAEMILE project, which aims to co-regulate the learning process in educational games by automatically balancing learners autonomy and the pedagogical processes intended by educators. We focus on our design rationale and the initial results from our user study.

Designing Visual Metaphors for an Educational Game for Parallel Programming

Modern computing is increasingly handled in a parallel fashion, however, little is known about how individuals learn parallel programming. This paper focuses on the design of an educational game called Parallel, designed for both teaching parallel programming education for CS undergraduate curricula, as well as for gathering insights into how students learn, and solve parallel programming problems. Specifically, we focus on the key challenge of choosing the appropriate metaphors in order to facilitate transference between parallel programming and the game. In this paper, we describe our design methodology and results from our preliminary user evaluations.

From computational narrative analysis to generation: a preliminary review

In this paper we present a survey of two of the main areas of research within the field of computational narrative, namely narrative analysis and generation. We argue that there is a gap between these two lines of work and propose a taxonomy of the computational models of narrative used within each. We outline potential mappings between computational narrative models with the goal of bridging this gap and alleviating the authorial bottleneck problem occurring when authoring content for computational narrative generation systems. Finally we discuss related work in this direction and report on our work-in-progress towards an end-to-end computational narrative system to bridge the gap.

Error Analysis in an Automated Narrative Information Extraction Pipeline

In this paper, we present our method for automatically extracting narrative information of characters and their narrative roles from natural language stories. In our corpus of 15 unannotated folk tales, our Voz system identifies 87% of the characters in the stories and correctly assigns 68% of the character roles. To better understand the sources of error in our system, we present an analytical methodology to study how the error is introduced by different modules and how it propagates through the pipeline. This methodology allows us to identify the bottleneck with the largest impact on the final error, which might be different from the module with the largest individual error in isolation. Our methodology can be applied to a wide variety of similar information extraction pipelines.

Lessons Learned From an Interactive Educational Computer Game About Concurrent Programming: (Abstract Only)

In parallel programming, there is a shift away from the single execution path of sequential programming to situations where non-deterministic operation force consideration of multiple paths of execution. Compared to the substantial computer science education literature on helping students to learn sequential programming, there are fewer studies of the cognitive difficulties that students follow when learning parallel programming. To address this, we created a computer game, Parallel involving concurrent situations. The game is an abstract representation of concurrency problems where players are asked to solve a progression of puzzles involving arrows moving concurrently on tracks. Play does not require coding. The goals of our research were to 1) explore how students acquire skills in the design of solutions with parallelism, and 2) explore how interactive games can substitute or compliment conventional parallel programming courses. Through two user studies of the game (n=7) where students played the game and used a talk-aloud protocol alongside a researcher, three major themes emerged, that of non-determinism where students were able to make the connection of non-deterministic behavior in parallel programming to the game, self-efficacy where students were stating they felt their knowledge of parallel programming increased after playing the game, and expertise where researchers learned that expertise was important to successful connection of the game to parallel programming concepts These findings show that students are beginning to see the connection between the game/s presentation of concurrency to programming concepts such as non-determinism.