Lara L. Schenck
Computing researcher, maker of monsters
Category: Monsters
One of my favorite past times is drawing friendly monsters.
My medium of choice is the iPad / Apple pencil combo in Keynote for easy use in slides and printing in stickers, but monsters are not picky about where and how they appear.
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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…