Londonmet FLSC Summer Show 2014

Amazing work from my students, who produced fantastic games and toys for this year's Digital Toybox  Summer Show:  www.thinkmakeplay.co.uk/show.

pH ART

A day at Chesterton Primary showing Year 2 kids how to make their own litmus paper using red cabbage.

Chop and boil the cabbage for 10 min, then paint the dark red juice onto blotting paper.  Leave it to dry, or warm very gently in oven.  When it's dry, you can cut it into strips.

Children painting with lemon and bicarb

Use the strips for testing various liquids - try milk, oven cleaner, lemon juice, baking soda, saliva etc.

The children numbered their strips and wrote down what they had tested.  When they went back to class, they did a presentation and explained how some things are acid, some are alkali and some are neutral.

Red cabbage litmus test strips 

At home, we used lemon juice, bicarbonate of soda and tea as finger paints.

icould - choosing a games degree

http://icould.com/article/choosing-a-games-degree/

Digital Toy Design

This was the first year we taught Toy Design as part of the BSc Computer Games degree. Second year students were asked to undertake a small piece of research into toys, then produce their own concepts and working prototypes, using Arduino as base hardware development environment.  The module focused on technical aspects rather than aesthetics.

After a basic introduction to electronics - a reminder to those who had done physics at school - we launched into some toy-hacking. 

The local car boot sale provided plenty of material, including a talking Elmo, a motorised train, a dancemat game and electronic language lotto.  Our electronic labs also had a few old keyboards to deconstruct.  These all proved useful for demonstrating the simplicity of the technology underpinning seemingly complex electronic devices.

Students began to play with the kits, experimenting with sketches and different sensors. We showed them how to construct their own large pressure pad sensors (buttons), how to link Flash with Arduino, how to create simple applications using Processing, how to solder components.

Working in small teams, they came up with the following concepts: laser-activated hit-blob game; pressure-pad alarm system for a house (not really a toy); "simon says" game (match the light sequence); musical soctopus. 

For non-programmers, "simon says" game was trickier than they expected.  The alarm system cautiously worked by showing which doors had been breached on a processing application.  Jamie and Kyle's laser-target game was successful and fun to play.  Soctopus got the award for best sewing technique...

Why do girls avoid us?

French, F. (2009) Why do girls avoid us? 
Presentation for British Computer Society on Feb 12th, Southampton Street, London

Here's a brief synopsis of some of the points:


1. Consuming not creating
Although women seem to be using computers as much as men, they tend to be utilising software rather than actively developing it. 
2. Back to school
Problem - we don't recruit as many women as men into computing at higher level.  Distance from technology kicks in around age of 12 - why?  Peer pressure, angst, snobbery (technical not professional), lack of role models.
3. Teaching
The ICT curriculum...
4. Poor image
Games programmers can't win - they're either too "geeky" or too "macho" - either way they're all men, aren't they?  Crunch time!  But industry is maturing, isn't it?
5. The nature of games
Look at what's predominant, check out the characters and the action.  Who designed it?
6. What do girls like?
Same as what boys like + social stuff (chatting, dating) + girly stuff (hair? handbags? you tell me) + personalisation (stretch to fit)
7. Media representation of women
Say no more...

Mobile Learning Adventure

Emerald-funded project, therefore strictly hush-hush for copyright/IP reasons.  How annoying was that. 

The most interesting part was a visit to Hayling College, early in March, to talk to a focus group of 11-year-olds and a selection of teachers.  The original concept changed dramatically in scope after chatting to the kids, who were full of excellent ideas for mobile resources they would like to use (no surprise there).

Some staff were hoping for mobile quiz apps to use as revision aids, but there would have been problems with content copyright and data administration.  However, there were other concepts to play with and we built a prototype based on one suggestion.  The PE teacher tested the system for us for the first time in June.