Antepenult

Antepenult is an obscure Ultima clone, created for the Amiga in the 1980s by Paul Falstad, and distributed as shareware. This summer, I learned about it by stumbling onto the CRPG Addict blog; the writer Chester Bolingbroke is playing his way through old computer games in the role-playing-game genre. He’s an excellent and engaging writer, and my quick skim of his first two articles convinced me that I should give it a try. I did not read these closely so I would avoid detailed spoilers. After all, the fun part is solving the puzzles for yourself!

 

Unlike Nox Archaist, which pays homage to the Ultima series, but is much more streamlined with modern design sensibilities, Antepenult is indeed a child of the 1980s. And it really is an Ultima clone – down to most of the graphics and much of the gameplay. I’d classify it as a mishmash of Ultima II, III, and IV. You’re a single player; there is no party. You consume food. There are basic weapons, armor, and supplies (torches, keys, gems). You can obtain other special items, some of which provide the equivalent of magic. You get gold by fighting the same denizens you’d see in Ultima. It feels very familiar. You begin near a castle and a town; and the ruler of the castle sets you on your quest. Basically, you need to conquer evil and save the world. Nothing new there.

 

You begin in the land of Havilah. If you’ve read the bible, some of the non-player characters (NPCs) have biblical names, some are the early church fathers, and then there’s a whole bunch of Greek mythology thrown in. I met Homer and Asaph in the same hallway of a city. They were composing songs and poems about the evil that had come and my eventual victorious quest. To complete said quest, I needed to explore different towns and worlds and talk to NPCs. I was given a list of items to collect, and many of the NPCs strung me along by telling me the next person to talk to. The four elements of Earth, Water, Air, Fire, feature prominently. I had to discover how to access these different worlds. And if you guessed it, the waterworld is called Atlantis and its king is Neptune. Two towns in that world were Tyre and Sidon. Yes, it’s a mishmash. And the special items you collect are Ultima-cloney. I won’t say much in case you ever want to try the game yourself.

 

I’d never used an Amiga before but I was able to eventually get FS-UAE working several moons ago. So as not to interfere with my workweek, I only played Antepenult for some number of hours each weekend. I took copious notes and I started to make maps. When I really got stuck, I would skim the CRPG Addict’s articles and get a clue as to how to proceed. This didn’t happen very often and it has been interesting to compare Bolingbroke’s play-through with my own. We used similar strategies overall, and occasionally got stuck in the same spaces. But any seasoned old-school Ultima player would probably do the same things. Some patience is needed. A teenager today would probably find it b-o-r-i-n-g. But someone who played Ultima as a teenager will feel the nostalgia when discovering some clever and amusing parts in the game.

 

Here I am at the final castle of the big bad boss.

 

After defeating him, instead of getting a “Congratulations! You won!” message, I got confused as fire and black spots suddenly started appearing and I wasn’t sure what to do and whether I needed to run out of the castle. Everything goes black.

 

I wake up in a restored castle Pergamum and as I walked through the hallways I am thanked by its many inhabitants for saving the world. Asaph was one of them. As were a number of the church father namesakes who gave me clues for my quest. One character who I saved from a high school in hell sets up a possible sequel. (I thought I killed the hag, but apparently she got away. I must have just killed the daemon inhabiting a body that claimed her name.)

 

The king of Havilah, Lord Hypnos, tells me how to return to my own world. Very Ultima. When I enter the portal to do so, there’s an amusing sequence at the very end. Another hint of a possible sequel. No sequel ever came. According to Bolingbroke, this was Falstad’s only game and he programmed it when he was young, and before adulting became a fulltime job.

 

I’ve now read in detail all Bolingbroke’s Antepenult articles. If you’d like to just get a sense of the nostalgia by living vicariously through his playthrough, you won’t be disappointed by his articles. If you want the full experience, get an Amiga emulator and give it a go. My copy was unregistered which makes the game harder when you’re in Tartarus, but not insurmountable. In his articles, Bolingbroke provides enough information whenever you’re stuck. My overall rating of Antepenult? It’s not as good as Nox Archaist, but it has some very clever bits. When I finish my adulting phase-of-life, maybe I will take up writing a retro-game themed on the four elements. I have imagined some of my own clever bits. Maybe my game will be the Antepenult sequel.

Exam Readiness

Augustine of Hippo (circa 400 A.D.), in a remarkable chapter on the nature of time in Confessions, confesses the following:  If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not”.

 

This is why I tell students that it’s very important to try and explain aloud their answers to conceptual questions. You think you know it in your head, but you actually don’t know what you don’t know until you try to verbalize it or write it out in full. Several years ago, I revamped my daily study guides to phrase what students needed to know in question form, and I also added “test yourself” questions to each of the study guides. Whether or not students use them effectively is an open question, but this semester I have assignments requiring students to turn in a subset of their answers. (The students get full credit for the attempt regardless if they got the answers right, wrong, or something in between.)

 

In my course materials, I have a section on “how to be successful in this class” that informs students what they should be doing from the get-go. I also provide detailed information on what students should read before class, and the main things we will cover in class. It’s short and pithy. Students follow it to varying degrees, or at least they claim to do so. But if they really wanted to be successful in any class, they should read Daniel Willingham’s new book, Outsmart Your Brain. It doesn’t just provide strategies; it explains the why behind them. It also explains why your brain’s instinct is to resort to less optimal strategies that require less effort but give you a false sense of thinking you’ve learned when you haven’t. I’ve read many of Willingham’s research articles over the years but these were not aimed primarily at students. Now there’s a good book I can recommend to students!

 

Each chapter of the book also ends with notes to instructors on how to facilitate student learning. A number of those are things I already do in my classes, but there were others I had forgotten or not thought as deeply about. This week I’ve been making a better effort to not assume students know how and why I have organized the material for each class in a particular way; I’ve been making more statements about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we will proceed. I have not been putting these up on a slide, because as Willingham says, students just copy things from a slide regardless of whether it’s useful to them or not instead of paying attention to what I am saying.

 

So how should students prepare for exams? They should prepare a study guide, according to Willingham. Turns out I already help them with this by posing questions in my guides. But Willingham has helpful tips of how to pose questions bidirectionally and at multiple levels. And he tells students you need to memorize some of your answers, not necessarily word-for-word but meaningfully. Forcing oneself to recall in different places and at different times works best in solidifying the material. And saying it aloud, of course! While I encourage students to study together, Willingham explains why this is useful, and how to do it effectively. When students discuss with each other their fragmented knowledge, it introduces variation to how questions and answers are posed. Different individuals help notice things others have missed. And students can test each other! Being tested is one of the best ways to prepare for exams.

 

Chapter 7 (“How to Judge Whether You’re Ready for an Exam”) had some particularly good reminders. It’s not enough to ‘understand’ something when someone else explains it, you have to try and explain it yourself – and not just in your head. Rereading can mislead you into thinking you know something you don’t really know it; rather you just have a passing familiarity and unless you’re forced to recall (without looking) you won’t know if you actually know. (Willingham recommends letting at least thirty minutes pass between reading and testing yourself.) I’ve stopped giving previous year’s exams to students because they fail to utilize it effectively, either giving themselves a false sense of readiness or going into a panic. (Read Willingham’s book for the explanation!) In distinguishing learning from performance, Willingham recommends overlearning – essentially “study until you know it, and then keep studying… It protects against forgetting [even though] it feels as though it’s not working.” He has a great quote from a friend when he was in college who said: “When leaves blowing around on the quad look like organic compounds to me, I know I’m ready.”

 

There’s also a chapter on how to take exams including what’s effective and what’s not. This mirrors some of what I highlighted from Barbara Oakley’s book. But I liked the early chapters on the importance of active listening in lectures, how to prepare for a lecture class, how to take notes, and how to reorganize one’s notes. Willingham thinks students should take their own notes in class, regardless of whether the instructor provides notes or slides or recordings. He also explains why being in class and engaging your mind right there and then is more effective than missing class and getting notes later from a friend. There’s an interesting section on whether one should do the reading before or after the lecture – that’s dependent on how the instructor organizes the class. And he gives good advice on how to ask good questions – ones that don’t annoy your instructors or your classmates.

 

Willingham reminded me that most students don’t take good lecture notes. It’s for a variety of reasons and he provides tips to students on how to improve, but I particularly appreciated his reminders to instructors. These are things I need to pay more attention to:

·      Talk more slowly. (I talk too fast sometimes, okay, maybe most of the time in class.)

·      Signal when something should be written and pause to allow time to write it down. (I’m getting better at this.)

·      Distribute copies of figures/visuals; let students know which ones they don’t need to copy. (I think I’m good at this. Maybe, maybe not.)

·      Students copy what’s on slides, whether doing so makes sense or not. (I’ve become much more judicious in the way I use slides.)

I liked Willingham’s suggestion of how students should work together and share lecture notes. Very importantly, it is not by dividing the effort among group members, but rather that everyone should take as complete notes as they can, and then once-a-week get together so each person can fill in any missing gaps and compare how different people organized their notes to see if any improvements can be made.

 

One thing that is emphasized in Outsmart Your Brain is how effortful learning actually is. Our brain would prefer to conserve energy and get away with quick-and-easy pattern recognition, maybe. I can’t speak to other fields, but the natural sciences are full of phenomena that are counter-intuitive, conceptually challenging, and theoretically abstract. Yet, they are crucial to understanding the field. Chemistry is hard to learn. I know it from my own experience as a learner, and I certainly see the same for my students. I hope to convey some of the tips and explanations from this book to my students.

Curator and Guide

Pondering what I do as a chemistry instructor made me think of the role of a curator. I’ve never met a curator in person, but I have seen their invisible hand when I visit a museum or a gallery. Someone decided what will be displayed, how it will be displayed, and what information will accompany each of the displays. There is likely a theme that collects various objects together. Sometimes this is made explicit in the information given; other times it is not.

 

I have gone on a guided tour before. In some cases, it was a Walkman and headphones that talked me through where to walk and what to look at. In other cases, it was a live human being who could also answer questions and engage in back-and-forth conversation. The guide adds another layer of detail to whatever is being displayed, calling attention to some features while making no mention of others. Time also plays a constraining role as a live guide moves you through one display to another. A Walkman guide with a pause button, or no guide at all, allows me to decide how much or how little time I will spend with a particular exhibit.

 

The author of a textbook could be compared to a curator. Most students have never met the author, and in many classes, the textbook author never makes an explicit appearance. But the textbook arranges the material in a particular way following a particular logic. When I use a textbook as part of a class, I am akin to the guide. I add flourish to some areas while downplaying others according to what I think is important for my students. But since I have eschewed using the textbook in most of the classes I teach, I have become both curator and guide.

 

It's been freeing in some ways; I feel less constraint in rearranging the material the way I deem fit. But I’ve only reached this point of feeling that I can be a curator after I’ve taught a course multiple times and developed my own internal logic of how I personally think the material should be presented. There is no one right way. But some arrangements work better than others, certainly in chemistry where a significant chunk of the conceptual knowledge is hierarchical. Concepts build on each other and the complexity ratches up. It’s more work to be both curator and guide, instead of just focusing on the latter, but it’s work that I enjoy.

 

A museum guide has never given me a quiz to test my knowledge after the tour. In my job as an instructor, I can’t stop at being just a curator and guide. I also have to be an evaluator. Have you learned something from this tour of chemical knowledge? What have you actually learned? Can you demonstrate that you have learned what I wanted you to learn? This is not the most fun part of the job for instructor or student, but I admit that I am eager to know what and whether my students learned. I start grading exams almost immediately after the exam is over, so students can get their feedback by the next class period. But it also gives me feedback so I can improve what I do as a guide and as a curator. A museum might get feedback from a visitor based on their interactions. A curator almost never does, at least not directly. In any case, my students help me improve my role as curator and guide in the breathtaking tour of the chemical world!