Walaber’s upcoming freeware game is looking great - available on PC and Xbox 360 (if you have a creator’s club membership). Its his first game based on his excellent open source XNA soft-body physics engine - JelloPhysics. Previously Walaber was responsible for a number of other fun freeware games and libraries such as WiiSticks, Walaber’s Trampoline and Stunt playground (using his OgreNewt Library).

This has been a long one coming. Not a long book, but after around halfway through it started becoming a more challenging read, so the review was slightly delayed as I was distracted by more accessible volumes.

I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, the work of Seymour Papert, educational theorist, child psychologist, and perhaps most famously the primary inventor of the LOGO programming language (also known as Turtle Graphics). Mindstorms chronicles the theories behind, and process of the creation of LOGO.

The central theme of the book is Montessori-esque self-directed learning, more specifically harnessing the power of the computer as an “object-to-think-with”. Papert begins the book by describing his early fascination with gears, and how his exploration and play with sets of gears laid the foundation for numerous topics of mathematics such as algrebra. He strongly advocates the significance of exploration as a means of learning - that directed learning using an “object-to-think-with” can be a hugely effective way of instilling understanding, and that the power and flexibility of computers provides an almost limitless toolset to create these objects.

As he suggests, many leaners are scared or intimidated out of certain subjects when they encounter a “block” or difficulty with a subject. This can lead people to believe that they are “not-mathematical” or “not-creative” even though they still maintain an interest and passion in the subject. This is something that becomes more pronounced as people get older, as they begin to segregate activities and knowledge into things that they “can” or “can’t” do. Most young kids are enthusiastic and happy to give anything a try, but its almost as if many educational systems beat any passion or interest out of people, and instill a fear of failure during the learning process. People who loved drawing as kids may never pick up a pencil again because of their low self-esteem and fear of humilation in any attempt to draw again (driven by some bad experiences in art classes when they were young), despite the fact that they may well have the ability to become accomplished at drawing.

Papert suggests that while we might be told that we cant do something creative or mathematical, most of the time this is down of an incompatibility with the learning process or model being used to convey the concept or knowledge as opposed to any absolute flaw in our educational potential. Traditional learning revolves around the direct, verbal, communication of knowledge and ideas. This is usually followed by a number of exercises and tests designed to reinforce this knowledge. One anecdote in the book described by Papert centres around a child that describes his own method of learning as “getting rid of everything else in his mind and repeatedly concentrating on the word or image.”

In order to explore the potential for computer-based learning to resolve some of these educational difficulties, Papert began work at MIT, in the newly founded children’s learning envionment. Papert had just come from spending five years in Geneva working with Jean Piaget (the child psychologist) and began work exploring the possibilities of the computer age. One of the most significant of these is the LOGO programming language. LOGO is an attempt to provide a “mathland” for children to explore concepts of mathematics and computation. It allows users to input simple commands that are executed by an on-screen “turtle”, such as “LEFT 90″ which will cause the turtle to turn left by 90 degrees, and “FORWARD 100″ which will cause the turtle to draw a line 100 units long in its current direction. More advanced use allows for the creation of subroutines with parameters, as well as iterative loops. The main advantage of this approach over traditional maths or geometry study is the opportunity for exploration. By transferring the learning environment from purely abstract to one where you can explore and achieve concrete results on-screen (and fix any mistakes you make), you automatically make it something that a child can relate to far easier (especially given the body-syntonicity properties, the fact that a child can “think through the eye of the turtle).

Papert draws links between additional concepts “discovered” through use of LOGO, such as bug finding and procedural thinking- concepts and practices usually associated with programming - and illustrates how it could be applied to other forms of learning. He provides a very convincing description of how learning to juggle can be improved by taking a procedural approach, applying bug-fixing techniques to iron out problems as you learn. He also points out the advantages of education in a system with a simple “wrong/right” attitude to achievement, where it follows a more real-world basis of accepting and learning from mistakes (and how mistakes can often be advantageous and lead to further learning and creativity).

Given that the book was written in the late 70s, when computers were far less commonplace than they are in todays schools, and homes, its sad that these theories and practices have not been further adopted. For anyone developing software or products with a learning angle (or anyone involved in education for that matter) its an inspiring and insightful read, and highly recommended. Papert’s ideas very much live on, the most prominent example of which has to be the Lego Mindstorms range, so named after this very book and its ideas.

Kyle Gabler (Spore, Experimental Gameplay Project)’s new project (from his new studio 2DBoy) is looking great.
ps. If you can’t see this and you are using IE - sorry. Something weird going on with Quicktime embeds and this layout.

As part of a Saturday spring cleaning session, while updating my portfolio I thought I’d try and get a release of Digital Snow out. I’ve been playing with it using the built in iSight on my MacBook Pro under Boot Camp, and wanted to have a play with it under OS X. Its also given me a chance to get my head round XCode and various other mac bits and pieces (which I thought were slightly weird before but have now pretty much got my head round).

Its also a first play with OpenCV (which I’m using to connect to the camera now). I was pretty inspired by some of the work at SonarMatica this year, and have a few computer vision ideas I’d like to work on. Several birds, one stone - its all working now.

Anyway, go and download it if you like and get some snow falling onto your face. Its all on the Digital Snow page.

I’ve finally got round to adding a few recent bits of work to my portfolio here on handcircus. Some old, some new, some ongoing. So just to round them up for those too lazy to check the differences in the portfolio bar to the right:

Path Intelligence
Ongoing population flow and density visualisation

Digital Snow
Installation made a year and a half ago for Exposure. Now downloadable for OSX (post following)

Bountee
Community site for designers to create and sell T-Shirts

I’ve blogged a fair amount about emergent systems over the past little while (and the last couple of bits of work have evolved emergence in some way), but one of the ongoing projects that I’m working on has involved something I’ve not had to do before - designing a new emergent system from scratch.

Most emergent phenomena that I’ve played with have been those that have already been explored and and explained by big minds over the past 30 years, so I’ve never dug that deep into the process of attempting to build rules that will lead to a specific behaviour. In this case, however, I had a system of a number of elements with no overall “system awareness” and I needed to find a set of rules for the elements within the system so that specific patterns would emerge if they followed these rules over a number of steps.

Most work of this nature that I’ve done before has been top-down analysis - take a holistic view of the problem and break it down into smaller problems and iterate. When you are designing an emergent system, however, you obviously need to take an entirely bottom-up approach, and think through the eyes of the elements themselves. This isn’t too hard if you are trying to create a simple pattern, but if you are trying to create a number of different behaviours or phenomena simultaneously, you will need a number of different rules, and these rules may well clash. While the outcome will almost certainly be interesting, it can take a lot of balacing to get to the desired outcome.

During the process of designing, tweaking and playing with a variety of systems, I realised how much fun it is to just create and muck around with these things. The unexpected outcomes and occasionally thrilling results are very much worth the effort. I’d not really thought about creating new, imaginary systems before (as opposed to studying and copying natural phenomena) - but its definitely something I hope to do more of in the future.

I’ve been reading through Seymour Papert’s book “Mindstorms” (a wonderful book, review to follow), and one of the more significant things that struck me is the varying effects that creations can have on the observer or user. What kind of emotional reaction do you want to generate when people first lay eyes on what you have made? Or in the case of a film or novel, it is a carefully crafted series of reactions that you hope to extract from the viewer/reader. I would imagine that the movitation that drives people to create in the medium that they have chosen is probably closely tied to the nature of the reaction that they hope to extract. Some people want to inspire fear or revulsion, some simply want to inspire the belief that they are extremely talented creatives (in the case of some wallowing, self indulgent work). Some people want to inspire shock and awe, others to convey the beauty of simple life. I’m pretty sure Michael Bay pretty much just wants to make big loud things zoom in and out of peoples vision.

Anyway back to the point - I pretty sure that one of the things that I would like to do is create something that inspires Wonder. Its definitely one of my favourite words (although Wonder Woman is a slightly disappointing superhero, and I’m not a big fan of Oasis). That sensation that is common in childhood, rare in adulthood, but that completely takes your breath away. I think that there’s very little that trumps wonder, and most of my most magical memories are associated with something that was so unexpected, so different from anything I’d seen before, so enchanting, so engaging or so unexplainable that it felt like being struck by a divine force of some sort. From watching my first Miyazaki (Laputa) as a child, to going to a mechanical animal park in belgium when I was around 4, the seemingly never-ending “Lost Cities of Gold”, and even playing Super Mario World and Zelda: A link to the past for the first time. It is so closely linked to exploration, surprise and awe that its effect does become more sporadic as you progress through life, as maturity and life experience lead to a more “full” catalogue of human experience, but I think the experience through adult eyes can be even more profound. Memories of “wonder” experiences are extremely vivid, they appear to burn powerful imprints into the mind that never leave, encouraging continued exploration or interest as time passes - in some cases forming the basis for many peoples careers and even their lives (I curious to know how many people working in zoo’s had “wonder” experiences in zoo’s themselves as young children).

I think this is something that is obviously a hugely powerful force in education - to generate wonder in the learner is to entirely captivate them, a form of meditative state where their focus is entirely on the subject (a rare thing indeed for the hyperactive youth). I think this is amplified further still when the nature of the wonder’s focus is interactive, whether that be an animal in the zoo or interactive software on a computer. My early fascination with computers was borne from what I could *do* with them and the exploration and discovery made possible with BASIC and LOGO, the provision of this extraordinary canvas for creation and play.

Even to this day, I do still get this feeling - from some of Miyazaki’s more modern works, Toshio iwai’s electroplankton, Haruki Murakami novels (particularly the phenomenal Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and even to a lesser extent with some of Miyamoto’s output (although this is definitely experiencing diminishing returns).

So, its taken me a little while to figure out, but thats what I want to do. I want to make things that inspire wonder. Easier said than done, huh? Not sure what to make exactly, but I’ll let you know how I get on.