Shrinking and Growing - What can Alice see?

In Alice in Wonderland, she grew larger and smaller at times.  What did she see when in these different dimensions? (Watch film below)
I still own an old NASA game on a floppy disk (unplayable), which had the players going to different dimensions!  I thought this would be a great theme for a game!  Imagine hiding treasures in the same room with your players, but they can't see them!  Math game: For instance, you could hide a treasure inside the period at the end of a sentence.  Normally unnoticed, if the player would have to solve which Power of Ten the treasure is on to even look there.

Based on the book Powers of Ten  ... 5-star Amazon.com reviews say, "In forty-two consecutive scenes, each at a different 'power of ten' level of magnification, readers are taken from the dimension of one billion light years to the realm of the atom. The text and other illustrations depict what we can perceive at each progressively smaller level of magnitude. " [Book by Morrison, Morisson, Eames and Eames]
"Back in 1968, designers Charles and Ray Eames made a 10-minute documentary film, titled Powers of Ten, showing what the universe looks like at different scales. Philip and Phylis Morrison were scientific advisors on the movie, which Philip narrated, and it was chosen in 1998 for preservation in the National Film Registry, which selects 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant motion pictures' for preservation. The Morrisons' book translates the film onto paper.

Starting with a view of a billion light-years, the book (like the film) moves inward, with each page being at one-tenth the scale of the previous one. In 25 steps, you're looking at a picnic by the shores of Lake Michigan, then plunging into a human hand, down through the cells inside it, the DNA inside the cells, the atoms inside the DNA, and the subatomic particles inside the atom. By the time you've gone a total of 40 steps, you're in a world of quantum uncertainty.

There is no better guide to the relative sizes of things in the universe, and no better teacher about what exponential, scientific notation really means. --Mary Ellen Curtin

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Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten

Great Film!

Watch Powers of Ten (cached copy)

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.powersof10.com/film

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Watch Cosmic Zoom, 8-min. film by Eva Szasz, 1968 http://www.nfb.ca/film/cosmic_zoom

at National Film Board of Canada.

Hiding inside the "Scale of Universe" by Cary Huang

My son, Daniel, just sent me a link to this cartoonlink Travel through dimensions of the Universe. Travel at your own speed at http://scaleofuniverse.com/ or just watch this video:

Developed by Cary Huang at htwins

Create a math game: hide objects in different layers, based on real dimensions, as this video is.

Create a Gigapan Game

Here's a place to create Gigapan games.  

Create your own game for free, http://gigapan.org/cms/create-games 

Gigapans can zoom in to incredible levels while preserving fine resolution, by combining multiple photos taken with their small Gigapan robot and stitching them together!

For me, I would like to hide objects on different levels that can't be seen in the overall picture.  They call this an Easter Egg hunt.  Here's one example by Gordon Atwell: It should actually work if you click on it!!
To see it full page, go to http://gigapan.org/gigapans/3768. This would be the 3d simulation the student goes through after drawing a pathway on a 2-1/2 d map, like Google Earth.

Moving through space and beginning math

Zander watching a squirrel. A clear wall or plane - the glass window - divides the short distance between the cat  and the squirrel.

This visual-spatial game interface can be used to teach many things, but it was first of all designed to teach math. 

For instance, a beginning math student could be told to go ten feet straight ahead, then turn right and go 3 feet, in an L shape.  At the beginning, they are just learning shapes, lengths, and angles.  The answer to the problem is an L-shape or a final spot they land on.

If they solve the problem while on land or an online game, they will begin to think of math as related to everyday space, which it is!) and begin to associate math with navigating through space.   Spatial abilities and visualization skills and abilities are related to math and science success, so the more you can get people to think that way, the better. There's been a good bit of research about this.

Travel through an equation: RFID visually tracks where people go

Here's some OpenSource (freely developed and available)  RFID software  that shows where people go in a conference.
It seems like it could be used to create math solutions (dots or lines). As players solve the math puzzles, or follow street maps, their pathway should show up as a math solution.  For instance, you could have someone travel the beltway around a city to create a circle.

Here's the software used, OpenBeacon: http://www.openpcd.org/OpenBeacon_Active_RFID_Project

Jobs for Autism

Here's an interesting letter from the Chairman of Jobs for Autism, which has similar aims to those of Mary Hart's Computing Workshop (see earlier blog on this subject).
A letter from the Founder and Chairman of Jobs For Autism, Mr. Jeffrey Stein

In 1988, the film "Rainman," in which Dustin Hoffman played a socially impeded person who could memorize certain facts and numbers that enabled him to break the bank in Las Vegas, gave many people their first glimpse of a form of autism. That was the year that I learned of autism as we discovered that my son, then three years old, was exhibiting certain traits that are characteristic of autism.


While the Rainman stereotype exists, it's rare. Unfortunately most of those afflicted with autism will not be able to earn substantial sums of money by beating the casinos. Rather, most face a more mundane existence that often culminates in the odd part-time job or years spent hanging around perhaps having an interest in something so strong that it borders on an obsession.


If a non-autistic person was as singularly focused on something as many autistic people are, they could be successful economically in that pursuit. But because of the perceptions of society, this usually does not occur for those within the autistic spectrum.  Therefore, a large proportion of people with autism spend their time helping around the house or doing nothing. This is a huge waste to society as well a waste for the individual. Those with autism who do work, usually go into a job that involves a routine and little contact with the public. Jobs such as warehouse work, data entry, mailroom and gardening are typical.


According to Steve Broach, a policy manager with the National Autistic Society (NASA) only 12 per cent of those with Asperger’s  syndrome [a common form of autism where the afflicted person is high functioning] are in full-time employment, despite the vast majority wanting to work.


Having a son with autism, I know that many if not all autistic people have potential greater than that recognized by schools or health care providers. When my son was first diagnosed, we were told that he might never speak well enough to communicate, that reading was highly unlikely and that he might never be self-sufficient. Even at the age of three and one half years, he had a fanatical devotion to basketball. Although he could barely speak and most people except for me thought he did not comprehend much, he taught himself how to read the TV Guide at four and one half just so he would know when the Lakers were on television. Even today, if you ask him how much is 120-40, he will be stumped. However if you tell him the Lakers lead the Pistons 120-80, he will immediately tell you that the Lakers are up by 40.


Although some people born with autism go on to achieve great things, the majority of them are not given the opportunity to fulfill their potential. The purpose of this website is to assist those with autism in realizing their true potential and to provide employment opportunities in areas that have not usually been open to the disabled or handicapped. These areas include the entertainment industry, professional and amateur sports, and even the legal profession.


The goal of our organization, is to raise awareness of the talents and capabilities of those within the spectrum, as well as serving as a forum for the spread of ideas, from education to health and nutrition, including new insight, discoveries and positive information, all designed to help those within the autism spectrum and their families, to improve their quality of life.  We welcome your involvement and input.

-Jeffrey Stein

Description of Game - Architecture Layers

There are 4 layers to the set of educational games I've been trying to create, called FunFunctions:

1. 2d-3d visual/spatial math games

2. authoring interface that connects games to 3d landscapes.  The solutions only have to have (x, y, z) points or lines.  Then they can be shown in any landscape. Teachers can control it more.

3. the landscapes are shapes, "billboards" and buildings placed on a terrain. Architectual students could build them, such as by using Auto CAD.

4. cognitive tutor: All the games would be displayed on a pallette that only shows games that are

a.  appropriate to the player's math level, 

b. favorites: the player's choice of conquered modules , or 

c. teachers' guidance could add more.

To begin with,  I want to get a full game running. I've had little ones running about 1993 and 2002, but I need to do this again and am thinking of using the a mobile handheld, combined with Google Earth and GigaPan. (The handdrawn sketch from the last blog applies to this).

Volunteer Artists and Programmers are needed

1. Artists are needed to create:

• 2d - landscapes, signs, quiz pictures in 2d and 3d
• 3d - architecture, plants, objects
• video - of 3d walkthroughs
• interfaces - what the players use to control what's going on
• find landmarks and treasures, as goals; search gigapans for useful ones
• think of optical illusions or ways to hide objects to make it difficult for the player 

2. a project manager to integrate these all

3. programmers would fit this together in an automatic way, running an invisible "cognitive tutor" or "intelligent tutoring system" in the background that knows what to present to the player next  but allows teacher guidance and player preferences.

4. Problems need to be written out and organized ( by level and type) and matched up with math textbooks.

5. Other: scan photos, organize existing videos and problems, list them

6. Put lists into databases for programmer to use.

There are other things.

Mobile game sketch and long paper - my project

Click on game sketch to enlarge it. Summary is written below.

Game
1. Shown picture: "Where is this landmark?"
2. You have 3 ways to find the landmark:

• your memory of the city
• a math problem (adapted to your level)
• a street map (like Google maps or Mapquest)

3. Orientation and location: Given a starting place, and facing a certain direction.

4. Follow the pathway virtually within a 3D scene (Google Earth), a zooming panorama (GigaPan), a flat or topological map, or actually in the physical world.

5. The player draws in straight lines, step by step (node by node) until reaching the goal...using a cube interface.

6. Each new segment automatically begins at the point the last one stopped.

QR code
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code 

7. See if goal you reached is correct, by pointing your smartphone towards a QR code or RFID.  There will be a few fake ones to mislead you!
8. Picking landmarks: Don't make it easy. Even if someone knows the city. their memory won't be enough:

• optical illusions where a road disappears (what's behind the bend?)
• within a different era (bridges torn down)
• different size (tiny gargoyles)
• hidden views (behind trees, smoke, darkness....) that need tools to view them.
• unexpected scale or perspective
  _______________________

This grew out of my 1993 Masters' thesis,
           http://slmasters.biz/Masters'%20Thesis,%201993%20(OCR).pdf

about a set of games, a cognitive tutor that connects them, and a 2d/3d interface for authoring, which I call Funfunctions.  It's about a 4 MB download.

Nearfield - Using iPhone and nearby objects to control media

This is a cute short video about using RFID in objects to control media shown by an iPhone.  For example, when it's near the Chuck Norris doll with orange hair, it shows a video about him. I'd like to use this to tell gameplayers when they've solved a location-based math problem.

from Nearfield.org http://www.nearfield.org/2009/04/iphone-rfid-nfc 

Video games and images become Science or Math if measurement is built into them, Edward Tufte

The philosophy is that a scientific image isn't a scientific image unless it has a scale of measurement built into the image. Here then are some ideas for building measurement scales into 3D images. (Also, the opening chapters of Visual Explanations and Beautiful Evidence, provide examples of scaling of 3D images.)
Call out a specific element, via annotation perhaps, and state its size. The call-out should be imbedded in the image.
Tie an object of known size to the image. [dime shows size of bug below]For example, the diameter of Earth isn't all that much greater than the Cassini division. That tells a lot about Saturn's size; also the Cassini division shows a foreshortening perspective effect and thus the scale is carried around Saturn in perspective.
Show the changing size of the Earth dot at a number of prominent locations in the depth dimension."  
from Edward Tufte's forum, http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002cI
___________________________
Therefore, for a video game to become math or science education, just add measurement to it.  Instead of turning "so much" have the child type in a number or use a protractor that shows angles. 
__________________________
Make Your Stuff protractor is at: http://www.lawrencegoetz.com/protrac.htm

Playing to Learn, Maria Andersen

Wait a couple seconds for this to load. Click arrows to see each slide.

Playing to Learn, slide show by Maria Andersen, http://prezi.com/a3unzv9j_t0k/playing-to-learn/
suggested by Chris Gagnon

Create your own 3D Games, beta available

There's a beta release of a 3D game maker.  Here's the email I received this morning.  ______________________ AgentCubes Beta News from AgentSheets, Inc. (303) 530-1773 www.agentsheets.com AgentCubes Beta 1...   3D Authoring for Everyone is improved!   The AgentCubes Beta Forum is buzzing.  We're listening, and we wanted to pass along the improvements. AgentCubes Beta 1 is ready!  If you've been waiting  for the latest and greatest, you can still get the Beta pricing during our Beta period.  But don't wait too long, we're working quickly toward release! AgentCubes Beta 1 is available now.  When you join our community of Beta users, you will receive the full-featured version when we release it AT NO ADDITIONAL COST! Learn More about AgentCubes Beta Their Mission is close to mine: "Our mission is to foster K-12 student participation in STEM fields through motivational applications based on AgentSheets technology. We provide a broad swath of students with revolutionary instruction in computational thinking and design that motivate them to explore computer science education and careers. "  AgentCubes Beta Special Pricing: AgentCubes Beta is available for $49 during the Beta period.  With purchase, you receive: confirmation, purchase and download instructions, access to both the Beta user Forum and the AgentCubes Arcade, the Final Release Version of AgentCubes when it is released for NO ADDITIONAL COST (msrp $129).

Learning Innovation, Nov. 15, 2011

Learning Innovation: The Future of Play in Education

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

4:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Location: The Regional Learning Alliance, 850 Cranberry Woods Dr., Cranberry Township, PA 16066
This unique event features presentations from Diana Rhoten, the Senior Vice President of Strategy for News Corp, and Andy Russell, the co-founder of Launchpad Toys.

Come out and discover the changing landscape of children’s education, and find out the new criteria for great kids products and creative play. Learn about new frontiers in the design process, and how leading-edge companies are researching play patterns, kid testing and education technology in general. Don’t miss this one-of-a-kind event at the intersection of innovation and education.

Diana Rhoten
How is existing knowledge shared? How is new knowledge created? As a researcher and strategist, Diana has dedicated her professional life to exploring these questions and testing their answers. Diana has been designing and evaluating educational policies and programs, organizations and technologies since she began her career as an educational analyst in Massachusetts. ...

Andy Russell
Andy is an educational media producer and a co-founder of Launchpad Toys, creators of Toontastic for the iPad. Inspired by the movie BIG and a lifelong obsession with small brightly colored plastic bricks, Andy is a graduate of Learning Design programs at Stanford and Northwestern and has worked for companies like Hasbro and Sony PlayStation to design playful learning experiences for kids. One day when this start-up thing is over, he hopes to rebuild his family's ice cream business. 

International Event: Play, Learn, Build & Share, At TEDxYouthDay events

Play, Learn, Build & Share: At TEDxYouthDay events around the world, speakers and performers share their great ideas with audiences of youth. November 19-21, 2011. 

Here's an introductory video about it: http://tedxyouthday.ted.com/intro-video/

____________

I think it's funny that this is a great "play" event (and the participants appear to be having fun) but they are all saying the same thing in unison, which isn't entirely a creative event for the youth in the video!

Well, I'll keep listening for the local Pittsburgh event and let you know what I find out.  It happens Nov. 20th here.  TED is a great place to listen to unique ideas presented--free videos at http://www.ted.com/ .

Child to Adulthood: Creativity and Productivity, by Keith Sawyer

R. Keith Sawyer

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~ksawyer/

As an undergraduate at MIT, Keith Sawyer often pulled out a new game from his pocket that he had invented.  Also, he enjoyed playing music, from classical to improvisational jazz.  These seemed like interesting hobbies, but it's amazing that his playtime turned into a productive professional career for him, greater than his college major!  He is now a productive author and professor in the area of "Cultivating Creativity."  Who knew that play would turn into profession?
------------------From his blog two days ago, Oct. 29, describing speakers he heard, I see many similarities with my own outlook:
"She [Shirley Brice Heath] talked about those people who’d done creative things in life, and what those same people had been like way back in childhood. The most important trait was courage, the decision to take an action and not worry about the risks. Yes, some of the children took unwise risks and got in trouble; but the ones who thrived looked at their community and looked for what needed to be done. Their creativity was rarely about making a product; instead, they created nonprofit and volunteer organizations and websites."
about Ellen Winner...
"The one she focused on was 'stretch/expand,' when teachers asked students things like 'How could you do this differently?' or 'Why don’t you try it with this other material?' What I love about this research is that it suggests we might try doing the same things in non-art classes–even in math, science, or engineering."
from http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/cultivating-creativity-2/
________________[S.M.:    This is exactly what I'm interested in--catching children while they're young enough to be willing to explore new areas of creativity, and use this to pull them in the direction of the STEM areas (learning math, science, and engineering; using technology).  Further,  Sawyer described my favorite teaching approach, constructivism, within a 2006 posting by Neil Schoenherr: ]
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Sawyer's QUOTE: "Most of the toys geared at children age six and younger are based on an educational theory known as constructivism," Sawyer says. "Constructivism is the idea that children create their own knowledge by actively participating in the learning process. Playing with toys — even something as simple as blocks — allows children to create their own play environment and stimulate their imagination."

Basically any kind of toy is good for young children as long as it is safe, of course, well-constructed and age appropriate, he says. "Parents can relax a little bit. There aren't really any bad toys or bad kinds of play. Because of my research on children's improvisation during fantasy play — which leads to all sorts of social and conversational advancement — I like to see pretend play that is more loosely structured and more improvisational."
--------
Video game systems have become popular for children of all ages and Sawyer says that they are not as bad as some parents might think. "Most of the research is actually pretty favorable for video games," Sawyer says. "The big difference between television and video games is that TV is passive while video games are active. While playing a video game, your child isn't physically interacting with what's on the screen, but his or her mind is very much engaged. Most video games are much better than watching television."
According to Sawyer, most research also shows that video games do not turn children into loners. "Games support a lot of social interaction between children. They tend to play video games with friends and when they are at school they brag about the highest level they've reached in a game."
The one down side to video games as far as creativity and improvisation are concerned, Sawyer maintains, is that video game worlds are much more constrained than reality. "If a child is playing a fantasy game with his friends, the options are unlimited. I think improvisation is very important for development. If a child was playing only video games he or she might lose the ability to improvise creatively."
---------------------end of selections from Neil Schoenherr article, "Finding educational toys is not hard; key is keeping child's age in mind" http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/4232.aspx, December 6, 2006
Just published by Cambridge University Press: Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching, edited by Keith Sawyer with a foreword by David Berliner.

Morphovision - twirling house: Toshio Iwai

A creative childhood
 led to a highly productive career
in art, video games and technology

This was an exhibit in the 2006 SIGGRAPH convention.  It was technologically far ahead of it's time, but originated in a child's flipbook sketches. Toshio Iwai, the media artist appears above (lower right).

At the actual exhibit, a tiny house twirled until images appeared.  It was controlled by a  touchscreen which gave the viewer math-related choices, such as sine waves, that would distort the twirling images. Here it is in motion! It was displayed in 2006, to show pioneering work on the development of 3D TV.  

"As a child, he spent time creating flip book-style animations in the corner of text books and making motor-driven mechanical toys, since these were the only technologies available to him." Toshio Iwai described how his childhood affected his later technological development work:

• "I've been longing for the feeling of my childhood in the digital world and that is why I've been sticking to relations among media, machine(s), and people through interactive works."[1]
• "All of my work begins with animation and never strays too far from it," he tells me. A simple flipbook animation fades in on his computer screen. "I started making these flipbooks when I was in about fourth grade," he explains, as a simple cartoon figure romps and morphs through its five-second life span. "This is one of the first ones. The margins of all my elementary school textbooks were filled with these. This is where my work begins. The excitement I got from making these animations has never disappeared - that and the fact that these are personal media, things you can carry around and look at alone."

By his own account, Iwai's childhood and schooling were normal. He was born in nearby Aichi Prefecture in 1962, the youngest of four children, and attended public schools. In true Japanese fashion, Iwai decided at age 10 on his adult occupation: animation and cartooning. Young Iwai also was beginning to acquire the sort of technical skills - basic electronics, soldering, et cetera - that would become the focus of his adult life. "My dad was kind of special in that he preferred to make toys with me rather than just buy me plastic models," Iwai says. "He was constantly making me electrically operated toys with motors and lights and moving parts, and he taught me how to make them as well. He gave me how-to books, tools, and materials. So, on the one hand, throughout elementary school I was trying to improve my flipbooks, and on the other, I was building radios and stuff. Eventually these two kinds of activity merged, and what I'm doing now is the natural result." [11]

--------------------------

Video games and art...

"Iwai is the first internationally-recognized gallery artist also to have led the creation of several successful commercial video game projects. This cross-disciplinary ability typifies Iwai's career...

...But the work that took my breath away at that 1986 exhibition was Time Stratum II, a pair of large turntables spinning under transparent domes and illuminated by flickering TV monitors overhead. These turntables presented the viewer with swarms of 3-D figures - basically card-board cutouts - that seemed to rotate, dance, remove their heads, and otherwise transform themselves. The stroboscopic flickering of the monitors, the timing of the spinning disks, the spacing of the figures, and Iwai's soundtrack were all worked out with the utmost precision and were perfectly synchronized. The result was superb, unearthly animation. I watched it for 30 minutes or more and left thinking that Iwai, then 24, was a young artist with potential. How much potential, I scarcely suspected.

"Movement is still my greatest interest," says Iwai, sitting in the homey disarray of his studio at IAMAS. "I believe movement itself is a communicative language, and I'm trying to use it that way. If we see an interesting type of motion, say, a flock of birds turning in coordination, we often get involved in what it is that's moving - birds, in this case. But even if it were not birds, but just dots on a screen or something else equally abstract, we can still be totally engaged by it." And true, the desire that drives us to comprehend patterns of motion explains to a large degree the appeal of ballet, schools of fish, pinball machines, and swarms of ants. On a deeper level, our visual receptors are attuned to detect and analyze motion almost involuntarily - it's a basic part of our survival gear. And art that taps our fundamental survival instincts can play off our genetic code for raw animal power and adrenaline, even while we remain at a loss to explain our interest.[11]"

Games designed by Toshio Iwai

Otocky (1987; Famicom Disk System)

Sound Fantasy (canceled; Super Famicom)

SimTunes (1996, PC)

Bikkuri Mouse (びっくりマウス?) (2000, PlayStation 2)

Tenori-on (テノリオン?) (2001, WonderSwan)

Electroplankton (2005, Nintendo DS)

______________________

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshio_Iwai

[1] broken link Multimedia Content Association of Japan Multimedia Grand Prix'97 Winner's Profile 

[11] refers to "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek," by Azby Brown in Wired Magazine

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_iwai_pr.html

Autism and the Digital Workshop (theory): Mary Hart

Mary Hart created the Computing Workshop for students with special needs.  One-on-one tutors work with age 8 and up students. Most have Aspberger's Syndrome, which conceals their brilliant intelligence with an unusual social appearance. Mary arranged activities to deal with these, including the instrumental use of digital technologies, centered on their favorite topics, as well as classes where the students discover standard social rules. Three photos and artwork by students:

Student photographed by student Z.

Mary Hart, photo by student Z.

Self-portrait in variations. Student Z.

Student J. with movie headline
 he quickly created:
"Bean, the Ultimate Disaster Movie."

In-process art by student J.: 1. hand drawing,
2. scanned, 3. partially digitally colored.

Crane by student J.

For seven years, I was a tutor in her summer workshops.  At the end of each session (usually six weeks) there was a grand presentation for everyone's family members and the public!  It included Powerpoints and web pages displaying pictures they'd taken, as well as often humorous captions; games designed, a virtual reality museum of dinosaurs, and many graphics and multimedia creations.

She aims to change lives for people who were blocked from technology and falsely funneled toward low-functioning employment, like janitor work. Here's her philosophy in her own words:  "Students on the autistic spectrum (currently, 1 in 150 births) and those with other cognitive and physical differences are being left out of educational opportunities in technology areas. Traditional educational settings do not easily accommodate students with uneven learning profiles. Students who exhibit difficulties in some areas but function at a high level in others (as is the case with many students with Autism) are often educated at the level of their lowest area of functioning. Students thus targeted for low level education will lack access to high level classes, particularly in areas such as computing and technology. Often, technology is actually a strength area for such students, who may or may not require adaptations to learn the content in a traditional classroom setting. Technology may also be an area of weakness for teaching staff. The “lack of access” problem is sometimes made worse when teaching staff assume that if they do not understand content in a technical area, the 'special education' student certainly could not. Being disenfranchised from educational opportunities in technology and other areas puts the student at a great disadvantage in terms of further education and employment. Many individuals who have the ability to learn in an appropriate environment, and who may even excel in technology-related areas, are thus relegated to low-skill employment, or even a lifetime of sub minimum wage sheltered workshop participation." See the whole document here: Digital Workshop: A Hybrid Educational Institution And Technology Based Workplace Designed to meet the needs of Students and Young Adults on the Autistic Spectrum With Other Cognitive Differences With Other Obstacles to Success in School and the Transition to Employment

Fun-loving Learners: What happens when they grow up?

Here are a few whimsical but true stories:
1. One choice--be a senior professor and author, as did Dr. S.K. Chang. Click on the top right photo on this page http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~chang/index.html (screen shot below). Dr. S.K. Chang is a well-respected international lecturer.  He is still having fun and including amusing  things in his teaching.  This made it very interesting and relaxing to take his graduate level class and inspired students to be very creative.

or 2. Grow up to be a Video Game Artist:
 from Art Jobs Home 

http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/jobs/video.html

or 3. Be paid to test games, looking for "bugs" - problems that will bother later customers:

Rationale for Educational Video Game

This was written years ago, but still holds true:

.  from the beginning of my masters' thesis in math education.

Three Levels of Interfaces

Describing a Funfunctions game, creating roadways:

1. There would be 3 levels shown to users (Interfaces): top-down Maps, Drawing in 3D, and Virtual Reality walkthroughs. From my web page: http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~smasters/SigmaQL/SigmaEx4.htm

2. There would be many variations.  One - for Drawing in 3D -  is in the banner at the top of this blog. There are more precise drawings but they are being saved for the game.

3. The same Landscape terrain could be used for multiple games. It could be pulled out and replaced by another one, like one drawer in a chest of drawers.

4. Treasures would often only be visible in the Walkthrough layer. Things like trees, smoke, and optical illusions would hide them, until found by following the math or street directions!

Appearance of One Game I'd Like to Create - Landmarks

This is a short game I began to create in VB that I'd like help finishing:

http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~smasters/Game.htm

________________________________________________

Also, pick landmarks that can be optical illusions with other landmarks, such as roads that appear to go one way but go another, or are hidden until you follow the directions!   Any volunteers?

What's This About?

Hi!

So far, these little clippets are sort of like the first chapter in a novel - lots of little scenes but only hints about what it's about!
--------------
Here's a PDF of my presentation from a 2007 ESRI Education Users conference that talks about using Spatial and Visual means to teach math.  GIS* attaches information to a spot on the globe, so that facts become visual - Global Information Systems.  Start on slide 4 of this http://downloads2.esri.com/campus/uploads/library/pdfs/57936.pdf


Please leave comments about whether this is understandable and any ideas it inspires!
____________________
*Here's a good video for 
"What is GIS?" http://www.esri.com/what-is-gis/index.html

Coloring Contest!

On a recent post, this was colored.  I wondered if any of you would be interested in posting a better version?  How?  Either....

1. Print this out, Color it, Scan it, and Post it with your comment (use picture tool to the right of "link" on posting menu). OR

2. Color in a digital version of this and repost it. OR

3. Draw your own version freehand! 

Best to you!
Sara

Mary Poppins and 3D

I think the first time I thought about 3D in a different way was when my mother read Mary Poppins to me. Suddenly, I saw all the space in a room and that it could be turned in different directions.  For instance, when Mr. Wigg floated up to the ceiling and the children joined him, by laughing! Here's a section called "Laughing Gas" where  laughing sends her up from the floor: "Michael, to his astonishment, saw her go soaring up through the room. With a little bump, her head touched the ceiling and then she went bouncing along it till she reached Mr. Wigg."[1934, by P.L. Travers, illustrated by  Mary Shepard, 35.]

Panorama at top of Arched Ball Throw

Thanks to my son Chip McCormick for finding this!


Here's a new panoramic camera inside a soccer-type ball! It will be in SIGGRAPH Asia's Emerging Technologies.  When thrown, it takes a picture from hundreds of cameras simultaneously.  From this, it creates a panorama:

ChangingLevels - my project

Here are some sketches for my game design, regarding Changing Levels.  Click to enlarge. Use Backward Arrow (top left) when done.

Vertical Levels

Basic Landscape: Surface Terrain.

Changing Levels: By balloon, birds, airplane...

Nintendo-like Levels, includes different games.

Drawn by Sara Masters. Copyright 2011.