Thinking Like a Game Designer Workshop

This Saturday Karin Forssell – LDT’s director organized the “Thinking Like a Game Designer Workshop” at the Institute of Design at Stanford – a.k.a d-school

“A high-energy creative workshop exploring how to think like a game designer.  (Yes, you get to play games too!)  But wait! You also get to connect with LDTers and friends.  At the end we will talk about how these ideas might apply to future projects.”

It was truly interesting – Core Loop – Compulsion Analysis – B-MAT and yes, we played some games and even danced!

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LDT Seminar – Week 3

Today we had the pleasure to hearing from 3 more LDTers 🙂

Also had group discussion about are “Learning Problem”… mine was definitely too broad and was more of a “Knowledge Problem”… have to refine it and phrase it better…

Original:

“Alex is a motivated young developer who is fascinated with the new AppleTV OS that recently came out. He learned how to create apps for it and it was quite tricky, even though he has experience with iOS Apps already. He understands  this is valuable content he’s acquired and knows that he can make some money out of this (and he needs it). He now has to decide which platform(s) to use to distribute his content. To address this challenge he needs to find out what are the available platforms out there, their market share, revenue sharing business models as well as usability, feature sets and appear. In order to do so he must research the topic online, talk to other users and subject matter expert for some guidelines and pointers. 

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge: 

  1. Karin Forssell – subject matter expert – LDT
  2. John Mitchell – subject matter expert – Vice Provost for Online Learning
  3. Soren Rosier – subject matter expert – former SRI researcher”

Revised:

“Alex is a motivated young developer who wants to teach people how to program for the new  AppleTV OS that recently came out. He looked at several MOOCS, online course market places, YouTube videos and other examples of online teaching. He feels like he does not know where to start in creating, organizing and delivering the course material. He wants to be able to create the material once and then be able to publish it in several platforms. 

To address this challenge he needs to find out what are the available platforms out there, their market share, revenue sharing business models as well as usability, feature sets and appear. In order to do so he must do more research on the topic, talk to other users and subject matter expert for some guidelines and pointers. 

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge: 

  1. Karin Forssell – subject matter expert – LDT
  2. John Mitchell – subject matter expert – Vice Provost for Online Learning
  3. Soren Rosier – subject matter expert – former SRI researcher”

Noam Gordon x2

Met up with Noam in person finally! We worked together in the past building Dial.Radio – a Firefox OS project – amongst several other design projects.

Went for some beers on Thursday at a local bar where apparently Elon Musk usually goes to. The bar is called “Antonio’s Nut House” – free peanuts guarded by a gorilla – peanut shells MUST be thrown on the ground.

Yesterday we ran into each other again at the park behind my house – he brings his dog every day – it’s one of the few parks that people let there dogs off the leash around here.

He was swinging at some tennis balls against the wall they have there so I joined in a little – hadn’t played tennis for quite a few years – my shoulder felt fine – maybe I should get back into playing again 🙂

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Human-Computer Interaction

So… changed from HCI 247 to HCI 547 (studio vs. seminar) It was going to be too much work for the quarter to take 247 but since still wanted to stay in touch with the subject, 547 offers a great alternative.

http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/

Amazing videos and lecturers – went to the first class today (missed the first two) – and the topic was “Transforming Design: Interaction with Robots and Cars” by Wendy Ju, Stanford University

Tech 4 Learners – Week 3 – Learning Technology Evaluation

Learning Technology Evaluation (LTE) Round 1

Tool Evaluated: 

Formative (goformative.com)

Synopsis

Formative offers teachers the ability to create tests or exercises for a group of learners with an intuitive interface and several question format options including images, video, documents and drawing boards.

As the learners are engaged in the activity, the teacher can watch their progress in real time – you see the students typing, drawing or simply submitting a response.

You can interact with them by sending messages to the learner as well as assigning a grade on a cleverly designed scale: 0 to 10, ‘X’ to ‘Checkmark’ and from red to green – all in one element.

The tool aims at facilitating the process of creating, distributing, taking and grading tests with a simple but feature-full interface.

Learning

The designers clearly believe that tests are an integral part of learning. Their emphasis though seems to be in the notion that learners can improve their learning by receiving “instant feedback” from the teacher. Seemingly rooted on Vygotsky’s ZPD concept, the designers created a tool that facilitates this interaction between the teacher and the learner.

Content

The designers saw the lack of feedback as a barrier in developing an understanding in the subject matter. Learners could benefit from receiving direct feedback while engaged in the activity.

Another barrier was the difficulty in creating interactive and hopefully more interesting tests and exercises that assess the learners progress. With this in mind they created a tool that made it easy for teachers to incorporate multimedia content in their tests and activities. As a result, for the learners, a more interactive and “rich” test or exercise – hopefully more fun?

Technology

Formative’s implementation leverages well the web browser’s HTML 5 advanced  capabilities such as cross-platform compatibility, quasi-realtime connections between teacher and learners, drawing boards and single-page app-like interface.

Assessment

  • The success of this tool could be measured based on a few criteria:
  • Teacher’s level of satisfaction with the tool
  • Learner’s experience while taking the tests
  • How effective was the “instant feedback” feature
  • How much “instant feedback” actually occurred
  • Compare test results from learners who used the tool versus those who took the same test on paper.

Evaluation
0 – Absent, 1 – Minimal, 2 – Strong, 3 – Exemplary

The tool is making effective use of unique features of this technology
Rating: 0 1 2 3

The tool uses well the browser’s capabilities for user interactions like drawing and single-page app-like interface. Yet I felt a lot more could have been done with the “instant feedback” feature – allow the teacher not only to write a comment but interact with the submitted material – draw on it or record audio feedback for example.

The features of the tool demonstrate an understanding of the target learner.
Rating: 0 1 2 3

The tool demonstrates the understanding that the learner needs/desires feedback from the teacher when taking a test or doing an exercise. Yet the tool seemed to be more targeted towards the needs of the teacher than that of the learner. The learner might see the tool as just another way of doing a test or exercise. For the teachers the benefits seemed to be much greater.

The design of the tool suggests an understanding of the challenges unique to learning the target content.
Rating: 0 1 2 3

The design suggests a very good understanding of the challenges involved in creating a test and the difficulties involved in grading and providing feedback to learners. The tool provides many options as to what kinds of questions and content to create in a friendly, simple and direct manner. The ability to annotate directly on images and text works well, as does the platform as a whole. The design also tries to addresses the difficulty of coaching, giving feedback and addressing the ZPD for a large number of learners at once.

FOMO

“Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) – common feeling amongst students since there are SO many things going on at the same time and you fear you’re going to miss out on something really interesting.”

Fact is, you ARE going to miss out on MOST things simply because you can only watch one thing at a time and there are SEVERAL events happening at any given time…

Yesterday – was not able to see a talk by Elon Musk about future technologies… today I’m not going to be able to see Elisa Villanueva Beard, the CEO of Teach For America talk about her experiences…

Just wish I had more time here!! kkk

It is mind boggling:

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LDT Seminar – Week 3 – Learning Problem Statements v 1.0

Learning Problem Statements v 1.0

“In preparation for the expert interview, write at least three short posts, each one identifying one “learning problem” you might want to solve in about one paragraph. Include: WHO needs to learn WHAT and WHY it is important. For each, name three people who could help you learn more about this challenge.  Post each “problem” here as a post on this discussion (not on a google doc as I showed in seminar).”

Response 1:
Bruno is going to teach a course on iOS development at a training center. He is a skilled programmer but has never taught before. The center has general guidelines as to what topics he must cover over the course of the next 8 weeks. There is no course material (slides, videos or written material) to support his lessons. He has no idea where to start or how to structure his lessons. He needs to learn some basic strategies, techniques and teaching methods to be able to start preparing his lesson plan and teaching materials.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Sarah Wischnia – professor – Introduction to Teaching
  2. Paul Hegarty – professor – iOS Development
  3. Denise Pope – professor – Curriculum Construction
Response 2:
Alex is a motivated young developer who is fascinated with the new AppleTV OS that recently came out. He learned how to create apps for it and it was quite tricky, even though he has experience with iOS Apps already. He understands  this is valuable content he’s acquired and knows that he can make some money out of this (and he needs it). He now has to decide which platform(s) to use to distribute his content. To address this challenge he needs to find out what are the available platforms out there, their market share, revenue sharing business models as well as usability, feature sets and appear. In order to do so he must research the topic online, talk to other users and subject matter expert for some guidelines and pointers.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Karin Forssell – subject matter expert – LDT
  2. John Mitchell – subject matter expert – Vice Provost for Online Learning
  3. Soren Rosier – subject matter expert – former SRI researcher
Response 3:
Luciana is the manager of a software development center which teaches mobile development to software engineers as well as complete programming novices. She needs to insure that the novices are actually learning the basics in the introductory courses before she can move them on to the regular courses intended for those who already know how to code. In the regular classes the novices have a hard time keeping up with the pace. This results in them either giving up on the course, retaking the course, hindering the progress of the class and/or feeling the school has not taught him properly. She needs to be able to assess the novice’s progress early on in this 2 week long course to be able to talk to the teacher to pay more attention to that student or schedule extra help sessions. She also needs to assess students who claim they are at a sufficient level to take the course. In order to so, Luciana needs to learn about assessment methods commonly used in programming courses, how to implement and track them effectively.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Dan Schwartz – subject matter expert – Dean – Graduate School of Education
  2. Jean-Paul Schmetz – Chief Scientist – https://codility.com – Software Developer testing platform

  3. Nate Hardison – Professor Computer Science

SAM – Stanford Alumni Mentoring Program

Went to an introductory meeting of the Stanford Alumni Mentoring Program – have to tap into all these incredible resources!

Vision:
For over a decade the Stanford Alumni Mentoring (SAM) program has been catalyzing relationships between students here on the Farm and alumni who were once in their shoes.

Mission:
We have a database of over 3,000 Stanford alumni and connect hundreds of students and alumni in mentoring relationships throughout the year. With a foundation of such incredible alumni and students our mission is as follows:

  1. Create mentorship opportunities that allow students to more organically connect with alumni.
  2. Assure quality interactions through stressing the importance of openness, sincerity, and appreciation in every mentorship situation so that both students and mentors understand the true spirit of mentorship.
  3. Provide support and guidance through the ups and downs of the mentorship experience and serve as a bridge for both mentors and mentees.

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