Books on XBox 360 and XBox Live Development for eLearning?

Books on XBox 360 and XBox Live Development for eLearning?

• rperreta

  At this time, the Xbox 360 is a gaming and entertainment device. While the suggestion of using the Xbox in an academic environment is interesting, Microsoft currently has no announced plans to open up the Xbox 360 or Xbox Live to academic applications.

  
  
  

• Kishore Babu Annavarapu

  The complete details of the Xbox 360 are not publicly available, and require a special license and non-disclosure agreement to obtain them. Currently, any commercial development for the Xbox 360 requires development in C++ and a rather arduous certification process in order to publish. In addition, the Xbox 360 is not currently designed to work with keyboards in any significant manner.

  Regarding Flash players for the 360 -- you need to contact Adobe.

  
  
  

• qx

  Well, I think you could still pursue this on XBOX Live Arcade. They have games that sell for 5, 10, 20, 30 bucks...

  Yes, you will have to charge a fee for your "game", but you could charge a minimal amount and if you don't want the profits give them to charity.

  Plus, if your idea is a big seller. (think "Brain Age" for XBOX 360) then maybe MS will be more open to supporting educational games.

  -Jeff

  
  
  

• dbridge-robinson

  Funnily enough there are a variety of options available to acheive this, all are based around the x-box being at heart a PC.

  So to run an LMS like Moodle you first need an OS, you can either use one of the MS Windows varients or use an OS that has been redeveloped or biased specifically for the x-box platform. System mods like this have been widely circulated and do not represent a significant challenge, it is probably something that MS should have done themselves given the increasing fusion between PC, media server and games devices. I would be biased towards the x-box specific linux OS's as they have been re-engineered to use all of the x-boxs capibilities whereas Windows has not and is probably best described as being bent to fit.

  Something like moodle would probably run quite well on a standalone x-box or you could of course configure it as a server and supply the world with your own little education site. If this looks too daunting then set up a linux (or windows if you really have to) PC, the spec can be very modest 800mhz PIII, 256 MB RAM and a few gig HDD.

  Content generation is a whole different ball game, You can make content within moodle but it is probably best to develop it 'off line'. There is an offering from MS in it's education section which is a very cut down lite version of Hunterstones THESIS, I wouldn't commend this one although it does have some very nice features. It is unfortunately a meal without the main course, to get the best from it and make your SCORM complaint packages you really need the full, and expensive thesis. As they use the MS office package as host the end products can have massively blaoted file sizes and be a bit shakey on anything but an MS browser. Oh high cost is a common theme in these things so I would commend you look at a different source of software.

  In the Open Source / FOSS field eXe http://exelearning.org/ which will generate you scorm compliant packages very easily, it can either be installed or runs as a standalone on the gecko engine. It makes very nice little packages based on HTML and if you understand CSS you can apply simple re-theming or totally recode the output to your own taste. You can often find some of the development team on-line and they are very friendly and extremely helpful, the timing can be odd as they are NZ based.
  If you want to make questions and quizzes then Hotpotatoes is also a very nice product , it's shareware so licencing does unlock parts of it, well worth a trial and at $50 for a licence good value if you use it. These are easier options than making the contents yourself and packaging them but If you want to try this approach then you need something like RELOAD http://www.reload.ac.uk/ . You should find enough background info to understand the mechanics of how the packages work by a simple web search for SCORM packaging, ADL is a good place to start though http://www.adlnet.gov/ ,

  If you do develop these packages as html pages then there are some good extentions for Dreamweaver available, Dreamweaver is the Adobe/Macromedia web development platform, very mature and very good which produces nice clean compliant code. You could try this with Frontpage but it will be an uphill struggle, as MS have freely admitted FP isn't the primary choice amongst the professional or top end at home web coders hence the new releases, personally I'd still rather use a plain text editor as then I know I will get exactly what I want and not an MS version.

  Have fun with the idea, the possibilities as they say are endless.

  NickJ

  
  

• Manuel Müller

  Chatterbox wrote:

  I'm a professional game developer myself. Although I have access to devkits, I personally find it a real pitty that Microsoft does not allow the hobbiest to experiment with the system.

  Looks like your prayer was answered

  http://msdn.com/xna

  
  
  

• Dirk Teufel

  According to the information I got from the Game Developers Conference, c# WILL be an option for development of the Live Arcade games at least. They did not speak of the time line. They did have running c# games on XBOX 360 on the show floor.

  I think your idea sounds great. As far as getting your game on XBOX 360. I think you'd have the best chance of getting it on XBOX live arcade. From what I understand, you need to email the live arcade team your "pitch" and they will either accept or reject you're idea. You should probably google for more details on this.

  
  
  

• doctus

  Actually, I wasn't planning on doing this commercially, but rather as a hobby for the bennefit of my 6 year old son and other kidds like him, who enjoy playing on the XBox 360, and also enjoy learning, but just need a spoon full of high end graphics and competition sugar to make the medicine go down.

  Is there different rules for this kind of development Could you please post a link to the XBox Live Arcade team so I can contact them

  Ask yourself: How many more parents would buy an XBox 360 for their kidds if they were sold on educational benefits I got the impression from the word "arduous" that you are trying to discourage me. If you would rather I not pursue this for any reason, just say so. I'm too busy to clash with a Titan.

  -Tom

  
  

• Deepak Pawar

  Tom Schaefer wrote:

  There was a recent announcement that Warren Buffet will donate >$30B to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and that the second priority of that foundation is US Education. Can't some of that money be used to add a LMS to XBox Live and develop compelling educational content, with "Achievements" in academic subjects

  It could, in theory at least, be donated to a charity making educational content for the XBox 360, but the content would still have to be sold commercially since Microsoft still wants its cut. Microsoft is not a charity and cannot recieve any donations from the foundation to do this.

  I don't know if any of this is really on topic for this forum, but just to try to discourage you further, I'd like to point out the educational software has been pretty much a failure on the consoles. Even on the PC where it used have a significant market, that market has shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be. Educational software for children is now mostly the domain of specialized electronic devices, like those offered by LeapFrog and VTech. These are the devices the parents have shown, by voting with their pocket books, that they want to use to educate their children, not consoles like the XBox 360.

  If you're still not discouraged, and still want to create learning software for the XBox 360 then I suggest you start by creating PC software first. If you can do that and convince thousands parents to use your software, hopefully gaining a bit of notice, then you'll be in postion to say to Microsoft, "I've got a way I can help you make a bit more money...".

  
  

• RoyAF

  There was a recent announcement that Warren Buffet will donate >$30B to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and that the second priority of that foundation is US Education. Can't some of that money be used to add a LMS to XBox Live and develop compelling educational content, with "Achievements" in academic subjects The good folks at Advanced Distributed Learning, the sponsors of the SCORM standard, now have a .gov URL:

  http://www.adlnet.gov

  Can't Microsoft see see this as a "Windows Anywhere" focus in e-learning

  -Tom

  
  

• Nikko

  I stand discouraged, but will continue to hope Microsoft will do something like this commercially so I can spend quality time in the livingroom, teaching my children in an entertaining way, and tracking their progress in numerous subjects.

  Thanks Ross

  
  

• dzCepheus

  Tom Schaefer wrote:

  Actually, I wasn't planning on doing this commercially ... Ask yourself: How many more parents would buy an XBox 360 for their kidds if they were sold on educational benefits I got the impression from the word "arduous" that you are trying to discourage me.

  Non-commercial developement really isn't an option for the XBox 360 or any of the consoles, so yes, you should definately consider yourself discouraged. Microsoft makes money by taking a cut of every XBox 360 game that's sold. At this point in the XBox 360's life they're losing money on each machine they sell, so they're not going to be interested in selling them to people who want to use free educational software.

  If this is really something that you want to do, then you really should consider doing it on the PC. You can find plenty of books on C# programming, it supports Flash and web browsers and PC hardware can be found in a lot more 6 year-olds homes than the XBox 360.

  
  

• ChadN

  Hi,

  I'm a professional game developer myself. Although I have access to devkits, I personally find it a real pitty that Microsoft does not allow the hobbiest to experiment with the system.

  I learned programming on the Philips Videopak game console, then Commodore 64, then Amiga. After that I started on PC, but a "PC" does not have an identity, no "soul" if you want, because any kind of components can be in it. The identity of a PC is only created by the software application interfaces on it (Win32, DirectX, etc), which are more or less standard (although many versions exist). On the old machines, one could really focus on the software, because the hardware was always same (beside PAL/NTSC issues...). Actually, when I created my Amiga games (Deliverance, Ziriax, Zarathrusta, Tetrix Metallica), I did not use any system software, I only used the hardware. I never would have acquired the skills without those old school machines.

  The XBOX or any other console has the same potentional. But the XBOX family really shines because it's unified memory architecture and incredible development tools which makes it so much easier to develop for it.

  A famous quote I recently read (in E - The story of a number) goes something like: "Science does not advance by inventing new things. It advances by creating a better representation of existing things, so a larger audience can understand it". An example is the dy/dx notation for derivatives, from Leibniz. To me, the XBOX does just that. It brings the power of a really complex deployment system like a PC to the living room, in a nice box that is the same everywhere in the world (except of harddisk space).

  Anyway, on the Amiga, developers also purchased a more expensive machine, costing about 2500 Euro in the nineteens. Why doesn't Microsoft do the same Make a devkit (with keyboard, mouse, more memory for debugging) available to the public, and make it more expensive than the simple box, so MS makes profit on it. But only allow people to publish signed content after validation, and if MS still does not like that, don't allow unsigned content to be installed on a regular XBOX. The XBOX will be cracked anyway, so an illegal hobby market will rise whether Microsoft likes it or not. Heck, as soon as the XBOX 360 is cracked so I can develop on it myself, I will most likely purchase an extra one myself! So Microsoft could just as well gain money on it by selling a more expensive devkit to the public :-)

  Furthermore, it is an investement in the future, because in the game industry skilled developers are hard to find. Schools are starting to provide education, but still, no education is better than self-education by playing.

  Actually the PS2 came with a BASIC on it's CD-ROM. One could save the programs on the memory-card. But unlike the BASIC of the Commodore 64, I don't think this was a succes, maybe due to the lack of a keyboard :-)

  PeterV

  
  

• TonyZ

  Just out of interest, Microsoft was involved in a joint venture project with MIT a couple of years back called "Games to Teach". It was aimed at developing education software for a varity of platforms including PC, Pocket PC and the original Xbox.

  I don't know if Microsoft saw it as anything beyond a research project, but it has since morphed into this > http://www.educationarcade.org/

  The old "Games to Teach" website had about 10-12 games listed (from memory) and some of them actually sounded pretty interesting.

  
  
  
• Books on XBox 360 and XBox Live Development for eLearning?