“The children really got into the game, and you could hear good reflection statements and questions. they were learning.” – Daniel O’Keefe, Curriculum Designer, Institute of Play
CIRCLES is a multi-player territorial game that reinforces the concept of Circumference = 2 x π x Radius. In this game, players are divided into 2 teams and each team holds the correct value of π in their controllers. Teams are competing to capture as many circles as possible with matching circumferences. Each circumference is created by pairing their π value with a roaming radius in the space. The process of creation is companied with a robotic voice saying “1, 2, 3, and a little more!” which is directly connected to the π lesson prior to the SMALLab experience. If the circumference matches the target circle perfectly, the team captures the circle and scores! However, a mismatch offsets the team’s π value and deactivates their controller temporarily until the value counts back to π again.
SMALLab Team: Kyle Li <SMALLab PL/Game Designer>, Lena Kotani <Math Teacher>, Daniel O’Keefe <Curriculum Designer/Learning Expert>, Shulamit Ponet <Mission Lab Game Designer>, Richard Bowman <SMALLab IT>
Run Run Drazois a game prototype inspired by inheritance and nature selection. In order to help Drazo complete its journey through time, the player has to manipulate Drazo’s traits strategically for the beaten path ahead.
Older prototype:
05/05/12 Cyclop prototype done, need to improve eye blinking animation.
I have seen quite a few nicely built flash OOO driver simulators online and wanted to make a version using KINECT. After all, henshin with real OOO moves is so much better than drag-and-drop with a mouse. The application only available on Mac. You will need to have OSCeleton installed and a working KINECT. This will also work with live-feed video.
In order to run Kinect and OSCeleton on your Mac, I followed Tohm Judson’s long walk through, there is no short ones… It was written a while ago so some of steps are no longer apply. Here are my notes when I install them again on my new Mac (08/15/11).
My MacBook Pro (Mac OSX 10.6.8, 2.4GHz Intel Core i5, 4GB DDR3)
1. I didn’t install CMAKE and it works fine. 2. MacPorts SnowLeopard installer. 3. OpenNI: link to download OpenNI has changed to here. 4. NITE: link to download NITE has changed to here.* 5. I don’t have the avin2…>NITE>Data folder so there is no 3 files to copy from. Instead (important), open all 3 XML files inside of Nite-….>Data folder and change the value of the attribute “key” inside of the License syntax to 0KOIk2JeIBYClPWVnMoRKn5cdY4=
The line of code should look like this in all 3 XMLs:
6. pbox2d library errors: if there are errors, 99% is because of the latest version of pbox2d library. The OSCeletion example is based on an earlier version of pbox2d, a lot of function names are changed for the newer one. Replace the latest library with the old one above will fix the problem.
*If the link breaks again, go to http://www.openni.org, on the menu bar go to Download/OpenNI Modules, then choose “OpenNI Compliant Middleware Binaries”, then “Latest Unstable”, there pick the latest NITE version for Mac OSX.
OUTPUT TO NXT:
I use Jorge Cardoso’s NXTComm library to communicate with Lego NXT Brick.
The file tree on the website is a little bit messed up for me. In order to make it work for Processing 1.5.1, this is what I did:
1. Unzip and change the folder name to “NXTComm” 2. Open the folder and create a new folder named “library” 3. Drag NXTComm.jar into the newly created library folder. 4. Drag the entire NXTComm folder into Documents/Processing/libraries/
Ignore the RXTXcomm.jar, Processing 1.5.1 has serial library built in already.
There is an example using this library on Diego Baca’s NXT website. The example uses a library called SpringGUI, it is no where to be found. I commented out everything relates to SpringGUI in the code, then it works. I also experience some delay on the response, solved by commenting out unused port readings in the code. Since I am only using NXT’s motor ports, these two commands are all I need:
nxt.motorForward(portNumber, speed);
and
nxt.motorHandBrake(portNumber);
portNumber: 0, 1, 2 speed: -100 to 100 (directional)
We have been hacking roms using YY-CHR and hex editor in the past few weeks. We alternated the pattern tables, color palettes, and nametables of existing NES games. The goal of these exercises is to help students feel comfortable working in a lower programming environment.
Week 1 was easy. I started out with a brief introduction of Nintendo’s history, and then went into how software design and hardware engineering compliments each other in the early days. For hands-on, I brought in a Famicom, a Famicom Disk system, a NES, and a few NES cartridges with different kinds of PCBs inside. It is important to throw in a few slides of how early computer was designed, especially the design of a MPU computer, because the idea of using CHR and PRG chips was derived from a static MPU system (ROM, RAM, and I/Os). At the end of the class, I showed them the YY-CHR editor and we hacked a few games. The link is a collection of hacked rom by students using the YY-CHR editor.
This semester I was given the opportunity to lead an experimental UX design class in BFADT to reimagine the commercial airline cockpit in partnership with General Electric (GE). In our initial research we realized how little did the cockpit technology evolved in the past 70 years. Newer and thinner devices are being cramped onto the vintage interface penal. Besides safety concerns, most of these modular devices are manufactured by different companies therefor the data are redundant and unorganized. However, involving human factor inside of machine-based interaction is a way to reduce the mechanic error down to 1/1000,000,000 which is the standard for commercial airline grade electronics. Our main goal is to shift the current engineer centered design to an user-centered one.
Student presentations:
Building the cockpit dome:
Before we decided to build a live size dome for this class, we tested with a mini one. The concave nature of a dome projection is like poking through the wall between reality and the virtual world. The result is stunning and definitely immersive with all the clouds flying by pilot’s feet.
Many thanks to Dave Pentecost and his post on homebrew dome lens. I am using an identical set-up to his with a Canon 15mm f/3.5 fisheye lens and a Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens. It was a great moment to see the projection in focus, now I want to look for a shorter focal length fisheye lens and a smaller aperture 50mm lens to increase the brightness, and to have the projector even closer to the vertical dome.
With the technology behind most of the 3D TVs, it is possible to display two channels of information on one shared screen. The 3D viewing device that Panasonic, Sony and NVIDIA used for their 3D TV are called ‘shutter glasses’. Basically, these glasses alternately shut off the left eye and right eye, while the TV is alternating between two video channels at the same time, one for each eye. If we take this idea of channel alternation further, we can create a custom shutter glasses that only view one of the two channels. I tested it with NVIDIA 3D Kit and it works nicely. During the flight, one channel can be used to display all the necessary data, while the other one can be used for flight simulation training or entertainment.
This is part of the initial research to create a dome projection. With no knowledge in photograph when it comes to lens math, my goal here is to understand what does “50mm f/1.8” mean.
Focal Length:
Focal length is measured in millimeters (mm) and it represents the distance from the optical center of a lens to the digital camera sensor when the subject of the photo is in focus.
With a short focal length you have to be close to your subject for a close-up
With a long focal length you can be far away and still get a close-up
A zoom lens has a variable focal length
A prim lens has a fixed focal length
50mm consider short, 200mm consider long
entire focal range: 11mm to 600mm, lens covers all doesn’t exist.
Landscapes — Wide Angle — 10 to 28mm
Architecture — Wide Angle — 18 to 28mm
Flowers — Standard — 75 to 100mm
Portraits — Standard — 50 to 100mm
Sports — Telephoto — 200 to 300mm
Birds — Super-Telephoto — 400 to 600mm
Aperture:
Smaller Aperture Number (2.8) = Wider Aperture = More Light
Larger Aperture Number (22) = Narrower Aperture = Less Light
Maximum Aperture:
The limit to how wide a lens can be opened is called the maximum aperture.
All lens aperture can be narrowed as much as you want. All lens today regardless of manufacturer can be set to f/16. However, not all can be opened up to f1/1.4.
I and two of my beloved collaborators, Albert Dang and Stephanie Tang, joined this year’s Digital Media and Learning: Game Changer competition. Our goal is to design and build a series of game levels in Little Big Planet that have the potential to maintain players’ attention span and help them form active knowledge around geometry. We eventually won the first prize, Best in Class: Innovation and people’s choice award. We were awarded twice by Aneesh Chopra, the United States Chief Technology Officer at the time, one in New York during the Games for Change conference and the other one in E3 2010 for the people’s choice award.
Sackboys and The Mysterious Proof (Sackboys for short) is a multi-player game consisting of eight levels built with LBP developed by Media Molecule. The game helps players master the foundational principles of geometry. Like solving a mystery, each level builds upon the previous and increases in difficulty along with the geometric theorem being covered.
All levels are designed to be played in a living room without instructor co-play or any kind of supporting materials. At the heart of every level designed is our conscious decision to alternate active gameplay (play) with narrative moments (story). The active gameplay engages the players with puzzles that stem from geometric principles, while the narrative moments give them a chance to process and absorb the concepts within. This a tactic commonly used in AAA console game titles, such as Uncharted 2, to gradually introduce new gameplay controls to players while engrossing them into the story of the in-game world. We spent the majority of our time paging through textbooks, constructing a curriculum, defining learning goals, developing a core story, marrying gameplay with narrative, and creating paper sketches and prototypes. Visually, we built each level based on a set of defined assets that are heavily influenced and inspired by Tim Burton’s works. We also look into historical mansions and castles specifically in the styles of Neoclassicism and Gothic.
As a team of professional educators, game designers, and user interface and experience experts, we looked at high school mathematics standards on geometry and extracted the foundational principles that pertained to the relationship between points, lines, angles, and triangles. We also had an extensive, but casual, meeting with a practicing high school geometry teacher in Yonkers to discuss the successes and shortcomings of New York’s current day geometry curriculum. Post research, the team came to a consensus and made an informed decision to flesh-out/develop Sackboys as eight platformer/puzzle levels based on geometric concepts that define triangles.
While working to expand the scope of our project with the additional funding from the Digital Media and Learning Competition’s People’s Choice Award, we soon came to realize the difficulty in finding a single proof that encompasses all the concepts that we deemed essential to a solid understanding of geometry basics. As a result, the original one-proof-one-level concept evolved into a series of eight themed levels based on foundational geometric concepts that build upon one another and progressively increase in difficulty.
The updated breakdown of the eight levels are as follows:
Graveyard (outdoor level)
Concept(s): line segment, angle, perpendicular and parallel lines
Themed elements in level: steerable handles, network of tree branches, spiders and spider webs, trapped earthworms, bone piles, crows, tombstones
This is the path leading up to the haunted mansion and where players are first introduced to the game’s back story. The level opens with a short introduction that reveals the mansion’s history and the legendary treasure its owners left behind. Players then cross the castle moat, navigate through the trees, shrubbery, and tombstones of the graveyard, and arrive at the mansion’s back door where they meet the spider mini-boss. In order to make the play-through experience more dynamic, we put in simple enemy AI and varied the terrain. The Graveyard level boss fight uses spotlights/torches to light up parts of an otherwise dark graveyard. These lights not only enhance the level’s visual appeal and accentuate the narrative drama in the boss fight, the rays are also used as devices to demonstrate how intersecting lines create angles. When players apply their knowledge of line and angle to maneuver the lights and attract the spider boss to a trap, the levels is cleared, and they are allowed through the back door leading to the Kitchen.
Kitchen (indoor level)
Concept(s): sum of angles in a triangle is 180 degrees
Themed elements in level: pantry, mice, cheese cellar with incomplete cheese wheels, giant roach that shoots out collectible cheese puzzle pieces, cat mini-boss (that we affectionately named Meowser)
The core mechanic of the first half of the level is to collect cheese wedges of varying sizes, mix and match the angles, and fit them into the partial cheese wheels to make them complete 180 degrees. After some practice with the mini-game, players then progress to take on the cat boss, Meowser. While Meowser attacks, the players must knock out each of Meowser’s eyes and place the corresponding wedges into the triangular posts that support the crossbeam beneath Meowser’s feet. Doing so will bring down the crossbeam, defeat Meowser, and allow players to move on to the next room.
Themed elements in level: fish tanks, triangular fish, mirrors, ladders made of shapes, mix and match sludge monsters
This hallway itself is constructed of a series of puzzles. The goal of each puzzle is to clear a path so the circular fish food pellets can roll down to the hungry fish. Using identical in-game stickers, players can clear parts of the board by tagging congruent angles. There are fail states that indicate player performance, so the act of tagging is a meaningful choice with feedback for educational reenforcement.
Library (indoor mini-game(s))
Concept(s): ASA, SAS, SSS
Themed elements in level: tag, mix and match book titles, librarian, book warms, moths, green lamps, fireplace.
In the Library level, books, ladders, sculptures, fire wood, paintings, and many more objects one might find in a library of the early 1900s are used to represent and reinforce the three different triangle congruence theorems: ASA (angle-side-angle), SAS (side-angle-side), SSS (side-side-side). The level opens with players emerging from a vault. They are then tasked to travel up an expansive bookshelf wall by pushing together rolling ladders of equal length to form triangular platforms of SAS congruency. Along the way players encounter the ASA, SAS, SSS bookworms that block their path. These worms will clear a way for the players to pass if they are fed Angle books and Side books in their respective order of preference. Based on research, a common misconception of introductory geometry students is the assumption that if all three angles of two triangles are congruent, the two triangles must be congruent. This mini-game is designed to drill in the fact that AAA (angle-angle-angle) is not one of the three congruence theorems. Several more mini-games of similar nature are seeded along the path to the next level, the Theater.
Theater (indoor level)
Concept(s): rotation, translation, reflection
Themed elements in level: cranks, switches, stage designer, animal props made of triangles (like tangrams)
In the early parts of the level, the players must advance past physical obstacles (messy stage props), but moving the triangle into a position that will act as a step to a moving platform. In certain parts, two or more players have to work as a team–e.g. one player must travel across the room to activate a switch that translates/reflects triangles back for the remaining players. The mini-boss of this level is the Congruent-zilla! He emerges from the bottom of the screen (similar to the kraken in Media Molecule’s Pirates of the Caribbean downloadable expansion). Once he has fully emerged, players can then use cannons to attack from below. The only way for players to defeat Congruent-zilla is for players to cooperate. To load cannons on the bottom platform, a player must operate a crank that rotates a triangular cover that refills gunpowder. In the middle is a triangular platform that a second player controls and translates between the left and right sides of the room. At the highest level, a third player flips combo switches to reflect electric triangular spears to attack Congruent-zilla from above.
Planetarium (indoor/outdoor level)
Concept(s): similarity
Themed elements in level: stars, projection, rocket launcher, fireflies, electrified objects, darkness, neon signs, similarity properties as a navigation tool
Players enter the Planetarium tower at ground level via an elevator. The goal is to fix the broken projector in the center of the sky dome. The level consists many small obstacle courses that are made of similar and dissimilar shapes. Players will have to make conscious decisions on where is the next similar platform to jump onto.
Japanese Bathhouse (indoor mini-game)
Concept(s): Pythagorean Theorem
Themed elements in level: tile work repair, soap cutting, bathhouse clerk
Chapel/Prayer Room (indoor level)
Concept(s): SOCAHTOA
Themed elements in level: sticker coloring, wave-like flooring, analogue to digital environment transition, statues, fractions related puzzle.
Four of the eight levels were developed to be revealed at the 2011 Digital Media and Learning Conference held in Long Beach, California, but only two were shown due to technical difficulties.
Sadly, one of the three founding team members, Albert Dang, permanently relocated to Hong Kong and resigned from the project in late 2010. Since then, we looked at different ways to trim down the production scale in order to complete the project. We omitted some cut-scenes and simplified the puzzles in the original document while preserving the core game mechanics. Based on our redesigns, all eight levels were published in different formats such as mini-games, tutorials, and regular levels. The redesigns still hold true to our original manifesto.
All-in-all we are extremely thankful to HASTAC and our People’s Choice Award supporters for granting us the rare opportunity to develop a budding idea into a realized project with assistance and funding, as well as bringing together members of the digital media and learning community with like minds and the common interest of furthering STEM education using modern technology via forefront platforms.
This was a side project for an online SAT prep company. I was the game designer on the project and parsed most of the math data myself for the level design. In my memories, this project was supposed to be short but ended up last more than a year and I was spaced out on the project after a while. Do math or Earth (cows + people) will be destroyed!
My most characteristic team: “Justin Bieber’s No.1 fan” Chelsea, “Call of Duty Expert and his snapper called Intervention” Nicholas, “the quiet Olympic Gold Medalist” Catlin, and “the next Steve Job Basquiat” Brendan.
Half way through the camp we decided to swap all the NOKIA phones with iPads for better performance and bigger screen. It was difficult when we tried to cast the magic of mobile games to kids but the wands didn’t work most of the time. This is crucial to the camp experience since we spent most of the time playing and designing analogue games. We have built up the exceptions for kids for mobile devices, we wanted the technology to work when they go the into digital game design which the last portion of the camp.
My most characteristic team: “Justin Bieber’s No.1 fan” Chelsea, “Call of Duty Expert and his snapper called Intervention” Nicholas, “the quiet Olympic Gold Medalist” Catlin, and “the next Steve Job Basquiat” Brendan.
