What's the Scarcest Resource?

Surprisingly, the famous software/hardware designer and author, Dr. Fred Brooks, says that what holds up projects usually isn't money....

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing. 

from a 2010 Wired Magazine article:    http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_fred_brooks/

He is called "the father of the IBM 360" (a major leap forward in computer hardware)

and author of The Mythical Man-Month:

You can’t accelerate a nine-month pregnancy by hiring nine pregnant women for a month. Likewise, says University of North Carolina computer scientist Fred Brooks, you can’t always speed up an overdue software project by adding more programmers; beyond a certain point, doing so increases delays.  

Mobile Pocket Projectors

This describes a mobile Pocket Projector, created by the head of the MIT Media Lab, Ramesh Raskar. I'm adding this here because it would be useful for a mobile Landmarks game.  Once the student/gamer finds the right location, several fake RFID tags could be posted in different directions, seen from the same spot or street intersection.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/pocket.html

This could be used to register whether the student/gamer had arrived at the right spot to see the landmark or view.  Also, they should take a picture of what they see and the software should be able to compare whether it's the same view, within a certain amount of leeway ("tolerance").  Using RFID tags posted on lampoles, etc. would pin down someone's success or failure quicker, because image recognition by computer software is still tricky.

Working together on the educational game set FunFunctions

Summary:

• Many of the following ideas also apply to the FunFunctions development project, at this stage of open source programming and preliminary discussions.
• The MIT Media Lab has impressed at every turn, such as when I viewed their products in the Evolving Technology section of SIGGRAPH, appearing year after year with something new, such as projected stories slipping off the edges of a table as you tilt it and a miniature spinning 3d house in a glass cube that morphs when confronted with a math equation (cos, sin, etc.).
• R. Keith Sawyer is in another blog entry.

The following is from Kyle Welche's blog, at http://kylewelch.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/the-mit-media-lab/

MIT Media Lab

"The MIT Media Lab is something of an anomaly in academia.  It breaks down walls that constrain nearly all institutions of higher education.  First, it is deliberately interdisciplinary.  Whereas most graduate programs tend to focus on intra-departmental synergy more than inter-departmental synergy, the MIT Media Lab draws experts from a wide variety of fields, spanning the arts, sciences, and communications.  Rather than maintaining a uni-disciplinary lab, they have developed an intellectual ecosystem that produces ideas and permutations that can only collaborative diversity can create.
...
Additionally, the Lab favors collective ownership over individualism.  Rather than adopting the traditional academic route that rewards individuals for publishing more than their peers, the Lab does focuses on projects large enough to not consolidate credit to a single person. Additionally, collective IP ownership of products includes faculty, students, and their corporate sponsors.
...

The Media Lab’s organization revolves around specific goals.  The body of faculty, students, and sponsors is divided into teams that are dedicated to specific projects.  All research, design, and development is centered on tangible outcomes.  A list of current projects (some of which are staggeringly bold) can be found here.

The first of Sawyer’s key flow-enabling conditions is the concept that a group must be focused on a specific goal.  Sawyer notes that flow is catalyzed when a group has 'a compelling vision and a shared mission' (44). "

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Sawyer, K. (2007). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN-13;978-0-465-07192-0.

SmalLab - Situated Multimedia Arts Interactive Learning - one way to develop kinetic learning ideas in 3D

Interactive learning - primary and middle school students - out of their seats, in kinetic learning.
Summary:
1. First video shows example.
2. For developers - free download of 3d game engine
3. Ideas of what to put in it?
4. To make it math/science, it needs numbers and measurement.
Flow brings embodied learning to any existing Interactive Whiteboard or projection surface. Using motion-capture technology - similar to the Xbox Kinect™ - students’ bodies are the interface in Flow. Students use their hands in real 3D space to manipulate images, sounds, text, and graphics. This kinesthetic engagement opens new pathways to learning.

For example, in the Color Mixer Scenario, groups of three students collaborate control the amount of red, green, and blue light that is mixed in a virtual spotlight.  By raising and lowering their arms, they can see a dynamic mix of colors, hear the impact of their actions, and feel the relationship between gesture and how a variable changes.

2. SMALLab Learning Developer Program has free downloads of the Unity 3D game engine and they are looking for ideas!

3. Comment with your ideas for apps to develop!

This is centered in Hollywood, CA, but a system was bought by a local school system (Elizabeth, PA) and McKeesport, PA, very close to me, will soon be adding the $34,000 system! http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourmckeesport/yourmckeesportmore/4680784-74/smallab-classroom-learning#axzz2ejtj50p6