Lara L. Schenck

Computing researcher, maker of monsters

Category: Projects

  • Poster design

    Kinda fun! For a mission teaching high school students about genetics.

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  • Medal Illustration

    This is for a poster for a 7th grade class’s mission called “Quest to Discover the World’s Greatest City” at Q2L. Students will measure the per capita income, crime, cost of living, and other statistics to determine the greatest city. Hmm..maybe Pittsburgh?

  • Update: Teaching endeavors in NYC

    NYC is treating me well, no doubt. In addition to part-time work at the Institute of Play, I’ve found a real passion for teaching and a few excellent opportunities: Front-end Web Development at General Assembly This is a ten week course covering HTML/CSS/JS and more, similar to the one I taught this summer at the…

  • 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…

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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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  • 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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  • 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…

  • Issues & Assets, a card game concept

    Issues & Assets is a card game about WWI I’ve been working on. Pretty random, right? It’s an assignment at the end of Game Design Concepts Level 3 (yes, I am working through this quite slowly) which was: Design a non-digital game with theme a relating to World War I. The primary objective of players…

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  • From the vaults [lnfnmo][NODOI]

    Since the relatively recent renewal of my artistic/conceptual energy, I’ve been looking through some old projects and writing a bunch (won’t be posting that though). I am at last reintroducing NODOI and lnfnmo. It’s been about a 1.5 year break. I totally forgot how far I had gotten with both of these – the biggest…

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  • Site Redesign Preview

    Only the blog so far. The header still needs work, but I’ve got some baller post formats in there. I’d like to post about them in more detail because until this point I’ve thought post formats were a little useless, but with some work they can be great. Of course there’s a nice responsive deal…

  • Freelance project: Cast Partner

    Recently launched a portfolio site for Castpartner, a Hollywood casting company. The site design is by Nate Harrison and hand coded by yours truly. I have to say it was a relief to not be responsible for the design – it’s nice to just be told what to do every now and then. Also, custom…

  • Digital Placemaking logo

    Here is a logo draft for Digital Placemaking, a spin-off philosophy/blog about using digital tools in (guess what) placemaking for local communities. Read more about Digital Placemaking here.

  • What I’ve been doing the past 6 months

    It’s been a crazy few months. Working 60hrs a week at times, but I guess that comes with the territory when you’re talking about startups. The startup in question here is Scenable, the app for local communities. There is an active startup and co-working scene here in Pittsburgh, definitely loving this city. Read about Scenable’s…