Lara L. Schenck

Computing researcher, maker of monsters

Author: Lara

  • Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code

  • How the Internet Works Comic

    I’ve totally posted this before, but just want to reiterate how great it is. I used it in my class at General Assembly and I think it was an excellent guide for talking about what is normally a really confusing/jargon-heavy topic. via Fabulously Broke

  • Responsive-ize WordPress Gallery Thumbnails with Sass

    UPDATE: Just use Justin Tadlock’s Cleaner Gallery plugin. I am in the midst of rewriting my WP theme WPFolio Two. I wanted to make the gallery thumbnail images a flexible width rather than their default fixed width. To do this, I gave the attachment images themselves a width: 100%; but needed to apply my responsive…

    ,

  • Cargo Cult CSS

    About every other day I read a blog post about a new take on CSS best practices. I think either “I’m doing right!” or, “Ohh that makes sense, I’ll change my ways”. Cargo Cult CSS is another of these posts, and resulted in an “Ahh…now I’m really confused, but this was an excellent read.”

    ,

  • NYC + Cute creatures

    As of the middle of September I started as the Design Assistant at Quest to Learn in New York City. My job is, well, assisting the game and learning designers at Q2L’s Mission Lab. It’s been excellent so far – I’ve gotten some fantastic insight into what goes on at the Institute of Play and…

  • Social Studies with Charades & SMALLab

    Recently I’ve been thinking about adapting common party games for the classroom. The energy and quick thinking involved in games like Charades, Celebrity, Pictionary, and Taboo would work well to help students internalize facts such as historical names and events. “Who Am I” (title will change, don’t worry) is basically Charades using SMALLab to provide…

    ,

  • I’m Just a Bill

    Some inspiring, light-hearted nostalgia for you (I just returned from a month in Europe and am not quite ready to write a substantial post). After that, maybe take a look at Jimmy Kimmel’s parody “You’re Screwed”.

  • Embodied Learning: Research & Thoughts

    Chemistry in the SMALLab. Credit: Ken Howie Photography> In this post I’ll go over two applications of embodied learning. First is SMALLab, a learning environment using motion-capture technology and large scale projections to track movements in space, and second is Science Choreography, a project through Wesleyan University and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange that combines…

    , ,

  • Reinventing Board Games

    Dominic Crapuchettes (founder of North Star Games) talks about the renaissance of modern board games. A few main points: Tablets are making traditional board games obsolete. Similar to books vs. ebooks: the production process is very expensive compared to buying a game from the App Store, and the convenience of a tablet is certainly desirable.…

    ,

  • Sketching with the Paper app

    A little bit ago I purchased a Bamboo stylus (don’t get the collapsible one) for the iPad and have been drawing with the app Paper, by FiftyThree. A few cute/bizarre results:

  • Redirect primary domain to a subfolder using .htaccess

    I recently switched hosting from Dreamhost to Lithium Hosting – seems like a solid switch so far. Migrating hosts is certainly frustrating especially since Dreamhost uses a proprietary cPanel. A particular issue is that I like to keep all of my domains in subdirectories of public_html. Dreamhost does this automatically, even with your root domain,…

  • Start your own Show-n-Tell

    Every first Friday at Catapult, we do an informal Show-n-Tell where four people or organizations give a 10ish minute presentation about what they do. Sort of like lightning TED talks, it’s a wonderful way to find out about smaller, under-the-radar projects in your community or to hear about larger ones in an informal setting. Here’s…

  • Short film about futuristic Gamification

    Very interesting, possibly far fetched. Though Google Glass exists, so maybe not! This certainly bodes the question…how much is too much? via a post on the Coursera Gamification course forum

    ,

  • Article: Gamification is Bullshit by Ian Bogost

    In a nutshell: …gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway. – Ian Bogost In defense of gamification, from the comments: Where games are rich…

  • Card Sorting to Brain-cleansing Games

    About Card Sorting Card sorting is an exercise in user experience design where a group of users sort cards with various words on them into categories. It is often used to determine a website map or to test the language of product, so the cards’ words would be things like “Pricing”, “Testimonials”, or “Tour”. About…

    , ,