CSE590D: Computer-Based Learning Environments

(Autumn, 2014)

The seminar focus this term is "problem formulation for wicked problems." After examining the issues of problem formulation (with a paper by Jackman et al) and wicked problems (referring to the classic paper by Rittel and Webber), we will begin to focus on a set of particular problems: including climate change, drug-resistant diseases, and weapons proliferation). We'll consider possible gamifications of these problems and alternative formulations. Our goal is to help people productively apply a form of computational thinking to seemingly intractable (meaning ill-structured, not NP-hard) problems.

Meetings will be Wednesdays from 4:00 to 5:00, starting with an organizational meeting Sept. 24 in CSE 624.

Most participants sign up for 1 credit, which involves doing the readings, presenting one of the papers, and participating in the problem formulations and the discussions.

Tentative Schedule

• Sept. 24. Organizational meeting.
• Oct. 1. Jackman et al paper. demo of CoSolve. (R. Thompson)
• Oct. 8. Rittel and Webber paper.
• Oct. 15. no class, due to the absence of half our group.
• Oct. 22. Climate change and sustainability reading and gamification examples (S. Tanimoto). The BBC Climate Challenge was a Flash-based game created by Red Redemption, Ltd for the BBC. It offers a formulation of the climate change conundrum in terms of government policies and programs. Additional reading, related to Fate of the World.
• Oct. 29. Haitian Family Cost of Living Game; MacDonalds Management Spoof Game; Article by art professor on modeling biases due to gamification.
• Nov. 5. More examples of gamification of ill-structured problems (E. Butler).
• Nov. 12. (A. Diaz Tolentino)
• Nov. 19. Breakouts and possible readings. Problems may include: Population control (X. Wang), Culture and language barriers (R. Warrier), Society and race (D. Jinguji), Water supply (A. Bauer), Urban congestion (Y. Chen), Disease Epidemics (N. Laha), Drug-resistant diseases and weapons proliferation (S. Tanimoto).
• Dec. 3. Examination of poverty, homelessness and related factors (Yun-En Liu).
• Dec. 10. (TBA)