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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • The Good Man – CSS3 animation

    Fantastic audio/visual artwork, created by Pedro Ivo Hudson. via Awwwards

  • 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…

  • An Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

    via Sidebar (A daily email digest of the best 5 design links. Highly recommended.)

  • Art and entertainment are not terms of type – they…

    Art and entertainment are not terms of type – they are terms of intensity.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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|..…