Lara L. Schenck
Computing researcher, maker of monsters
Blog
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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…
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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.…
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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:
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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,…
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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…
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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
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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…
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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…
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Chrome Maze
This is incredible, like, really incredible.
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Themes from DML 2013
Had a great weekend at DML 2013: met a ton of excellent people, heard excellent talks, and had some excellent dinners in Chi City. A few resonant themes and takeaways: Civics are not in crisis, agency is. It seems like civics are the problem because of widely popularized (and hilarious) media showing ignorance (Jaywalking). The…
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Hippo illustration
I needed to make an anthropomorphic/mentor-like figure for a project and did some experimenting with a hippo. Pretty cute, if I do say so myself.
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DML Conference 2013
In a couple of weeks (March 14-16) I’ll be heading to Chicago for the annual Digital Media and Learning Conference organized by the DML Research Hub. The theme this year is “Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices, and Remixing Youth Participation”. There has been a longstanding narrative of youth political apathy and disengagement from democratic life. As…
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Research on Curriculum Design and Quest to Learn
Article: Quest to Learn as a Model for Higher Education Pretty much exactly what I want to do. In this article, Justin W. Marquis goes through a few key features of Q2L and examines how they might be applied to higher ed, particularly the application of design and systems thinking. Tools: Q Design Packs from…
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Some advice for freelancers
I’ve been freelancing full time for about 6 months now and finally feel that I’ve streamlined my process. I’d like to share a few things that made a huge difference for me: Find a co-working space. I rent a desk at CatapultPGH, and have no idea what I would do without it. The community is…
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Global Game Jam 2013
I participated in the Pittsburgh Global Game jam this past weekend. In a sentence, the GGJ is a worldwide event where teams make a game in under 48 hours according to a predetermined theme – read more here. I was the 2D artist on a team with two fantastic programmers, Jim Newsome and Brian Bogovich,…
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The F & Z Layouts in Web Design
On the F layout: The F-Layout relies upon various eyetracking studies for it’s foundational concept. These scientific studies show that web surfers read the screen in an “F” pattern – seeing the top, upper left corner and left sides of the screen most… only occasionally taking glances towards the right side of the screen. These…
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The Good Man – CSS3 animation
Fantastic audio/visual artwork, created by Pedro Ivo Hudson. via Awwwards
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Notes on the Principles of Game-like Learning
I just watched a great webinar at Connected Learning with Katie Salen who is a co-author of Rules of Play, and director of the Institute of Play. Below is a recording followed by some notes. Katie Salen: Making Learning Irresistible: 6 Principles of Game-like Learning Key Design Principles How do we to take a theory…
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An Interactive Guide to Blog Typography
via Sidebar (A daily email digest of the best 5 design links. Highly recommended.)
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Art and entertainment are not terms of type – they…
Art and entertainment are not terms of type – they are terms of intensity.
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Educational Games Research
Article: Learning to Play to Learn – Lessons in Educational Game Design by Eric Zimmerman and Nick Fortugno Excellent article summarizing the state of educational games. It addressing the split between educators and developers as well as the importance of using games to communicate process, not raw data: …if your aim is to create a…
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Listen to: improv4humans
Excellent podcast with founding member of Upright Citizens Brigade Matt Besser. Each episode features fantastic improvisers who break off into scenes as they discuss miscellaneous topics. Dirty humor is not uncommon, fyi.
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New Experiments in Self-teaching [TED Talk]
Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education – the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we…
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Remove .php from URLs [Snippet]
When making custom sites, I separate my code into various php files that each include a consistent header and footer so that I don’t have to deal with verbose, redundant HTML files. By default you end up with gross URLs like mysite.com/contact.php. Make it mysite.com/contact by adding this to your .htaccess file and replacing index|about|..…
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Epic Small this week = Socrates + Game Mechanics
Epic what? Started by the brilliant Sam Wilson (a member of Catapult as well!), Epic Small helps you accomplish small creative tasks one at a time at week long intervals. Here’s an article by Kate Stoltzfus at Yinzpiration with some more info. I was on a roll with Epic Smalls a couple months ago…