~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~
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Why “Clear and Easy to Understand” can be bad | Usable Learning
So, as an instructional designer, part of my job is to make things clear and easy to understand, right?
Well, it turns out that’s not necessarily the best option.
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Non-gamers, here’s why you should care about games | VentureBeat
As an early investor in social gaming, I’m often speaking on panels to audiences of gamers, investors, and game company execs. At one such event — the Future of Media conference hosted by Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — the opening question was why gaming is relevant to people who are not gamers. The panelists — folks from IGN, Activision, GaiKai, and Riot Games as well as myself — gave some interesting reasons for why non-gamers should care about the game market:
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What’s the Secret Sauce to a Great Educational Game? | MindShift
Chocolate-covered broccoli. That’s what designers of educational games call digital products that drape dull academic instruction in the superficially appealing disguise of a game. Instead of placing the fun of discovery and mastery at the heart of the game, these imposters use the trappings of games “as a sugar coating” for their otherwise unappetizing content, note Jacob Habgood and Shaaron Ainsworth.
The two researchers, from the University of Nottingham in England, recently decided to find out whether children could detect such subterfuge, and whether they benefited more from lessons that masquerade as games—or from games that make learning an end in itself.
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In his wonderful essay on Alan Perlis’ 1961 Sloan School lecture, Michael Mateas points out that Perlis explicitly saw programming as a medium.
Here Perlis makes it clear that programming is a medium, in fact the medium peculiarly suited for describing processes, and as such, a fundamental component of cultural literacy, and a fundamental skill required of new media practitioners and theorists.
I’ve always loved the idea of programming as a form of expression, and most CS departments used to teach different paradigms of programming as different ways of thinking about problems. Google searching, you’ll find that “Computation/programming as an expressive medium” is being taught out there — but not to computer scientists. Film students, digital media theorists, even social scientists are being taught about programming as a medium. But for the most part, not computer scientists.
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Wow, no one saw this coming. The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.
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Gamasutra – Features – Making Lean Startup Tactics Work for Games
If you’re involved in the startup community or even just follow Hacker News, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard about “lean startups” or the “lean startup method.” In his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries outlines a framework for small, innovative teams to more efficiently find product/market fit for new products. At its core is a focus on evaluating product design decisions based on user data gathered from scientific experiments. Eric argues that by making “validated learning” your key goal, you shortcut your time to building a wildly successful mass market product.
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For Pygmies, Size May Not Matter – Percolator – The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the outside, evolution sometimes seems fairly obvious: Finch beaks got bigger to crack harder nuts, dolphins and sharks developed shapes that let them move smoothly through the water. A peek under the skin and into the genes, however, can yield surprises. Pygmies have just gotten such a close look. And being short–their most obvious feature–may actually be a sort of evolutionary side effect: What they really needed were genes that confer resistance to disease, and those same genes happened to disrupt growth.
