Beaten to the punch by MIT on this one: Scratch. It does most of what I had in my first Design and Education project, which itself was a proposal to extend MIT's Logo Blocks into a more general-purpose multimedia programming application. Admittedly, mine was more of a game than a toolbox, and had a specific narrative structure in mind, but as far as using graphical means for exploring programming goals, Scratch does a really amazing job.

I'd like to spend a few days with this and try to work past the visual bling to get into it as a teaching tool. But I'm encouraged by it and I'd like to see how well it could be used for intro programming classes like CDT Bootcamp.

A mock up of an applet that would let designers explore the possibilities of a sine wave graphically.

Challenge

Design a lecture or instructional piece for something missing from the MFADT curriculum.

Problem

Topic

Teaching graduate design students the kinds of math they need to do interesting graphics, games, and other computational designs.

Audience

Parsons MFADT students.

Setting

In class or in lab project work.

Problem

What is the best and most useful way to provide Parsons MFADT students with the kinds of math that they need with out getting bogged down in details that do not relate to their needs or work?

For my game, I originally modified Apples to Apples to work with animals and their behaviors and habitats. The very first play test of this occurred in class, with four of my classmates playing. As much fun as the original game was, though, play was slow and the learning features were a little clunky--recording the animals and their traits clogged up the game play.

The game I came up with after that, based on suggestions from that class, was more like dominoes, specifically the "Mexican Train" variation. The twist I put on it was faithful to my original educational goal of teaching kids about the lives and homes of animals. Each domino had a name and picture of an animal, and a set of four icons that depicted that animal's identity. The icons represented:

Cisco Systems - Binary Game - Cisco.com - [My del.icio.us]

Thanks to Lena Ghaleb for sending me this. I think this game would be really useful for teaching the basics of binary in a lot of contexts. Nice example of worthwhile educational game--fun and challenging.

So, I'm thinking about adapting Apples to Apples as an educational game. I'm jotting down a couple ideas I've had so far.

• Every "noun" card is an animal.
• Every "adjective" card could describe an animal. These could be words like "aquatic," "big," "gray," "squishy," "slimy."
• Instead of the judge player picking just one card submitted by the other player per round that describes the animal, the judge is free to pick as many that work.
• The cards are either then saved as a stack to be reviewed by the teacher at the end of the activity or the words and animal are written down on a worksheet.
• The point values for winning will probably have to be increased because more cards will be able to be picked by the judge.