Once again proving that the simple interactives are often the most engaging and playful, this Jackson Pollockpiece by Miltos Manetas and Stamen has apparently been around since 2003, but I hadn’t seen it. It’s a simple click and move the mouse around affair, but the feeling of the paint splodging around is surprisingly pleasant.
You can also download the source-code from Stamen too.
[tags]stamen, pollock[/tags]
From the old, beloved Atari 2600 joystick to the Wiimote, how did we get from there to here?
The “Sock Master’s” family tree of controllers has the goods. There are some classics and some real stinkers like the The Nintendo Virtual Boy Controller. What were they thinking?
[tags]controllers, games, videogames, hardware[/tags]
There’s a well-balanced piece from Patrick Wintourin the Guardian today about parents being shown how to protect their children online.
It reports of a government initiative based on a review by Dr Tanya Byron (she works as a consultant in child and adolescent mental health and also presented quite a few programmes for the BBC on the subject).
I’ve only skim-read the main points of the report (which is available for download in full), but it makes interesting reading. The most important aspect is that she goes quite thoroughly through the pros and cons of the use of technologies - from social networks and general internet use to online videogames. It also draws upon a lot of evidence from children themselves.
It’s nice to see Byron is not pedalling the old ‘it rots young minds and they’re all being groomed by pedophiles’ line, by rather she looks at the complexities of the interactions between parents, children, society and technology:
“Ironically parents’ concerns about risk and safety of their children in the streets and outside has driven a generation of children indoors, where it could be argued they are being exposed to a whole new set of risks.”
It’s good to see some of the onus being put back on parents too. The use of these technologies is not inherently better or worse than what children used in previous generations and I’ve lost count of the amount of conversations I’ve had about videogames.
Arguably the use of these technologies are mostly beneficial, especially in the future that children will be growing into. The real problem is that many parents have no idea about how the internet functions, about social spaces online or the culture of videogames and that really needs to change.
It’s good to see this kind of research and well worth a read - it’s well-written too. (There are also quite a few annexed documents about the methodology and brain development research that background the report).
Photo: uncleboatshoes on Flickr
[tags]Tanya Byron, child development, videogames, parenting[/tags]
Metric is so passé. Just how much is a hill of beans? I’m not sure, but I know the problems of three little people don’t amount to one.
On the other hand, this very amusing “Domestic Science” measuring jug from Harry White Design will at least measure 100 penne pasta, ten billion grains of icing sugar or half a human brain.
I like things like this that make everyday tasks a bit more playful and pleasurable. Maybe car speedometers should have a scale from zero to “enough CO2 to melt the ice-caps”.
You can buy the jug on Amazon from Fred
[tags]playful, everyday[/tags].
Everyvideogame.com is an archive of “all the Nintendo games you grew up with - online and free”. I was more of a Atari, ZX Specturm and Sega man myself, but this a pretty good archive. Prepare to waste an hour or so.
[tags]games, emulator, nintendo, archive[/tags]
There’s an interesting piece about Creative Play on NPR at the moment that looks at a school running the Tools of the Mind programme.
One of the findings of the research is that creative play helps regulate executive function:
Executive function has a number of elements, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility. But perhaps the most important is self-regulation — the ability for kids to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline. Executive function — and its self-regulation element — is important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ.
The Tools of the Mind approach helps children move along a continuum “from being regulated by others to engaging in “shared†regulation to eventually becoming “masters of their own behavior.— A large part of it is about not just going out to play, but rather writing out the plan and presenting what they’re going to do before then acting out the play part.
It’s one more pointer towards the importance and value of play, although it still gets tangled up in issues about media and videogames being ‘obviously bad’ and falls into the “play as progress” rhetoric that Brian Sutton-Smith cast so much doubt upon.
There’s also a related NPR story on play building serious skills that’s worth reading.
(Photo credit: wwworks on Flickr)
Troika, the folks behind the cloud sculpture at Heathrow, have created a virus on a USB stick, called the Newton Virus (for manual infection) that makes your desktop fall to pieces. It also uses the tilt sensors in the Macbooks for some gravity fun so you can shake the pieces around.
The piece isn’t design to be malicious. It harks back to the golden days when viruses were there to amuse rather than to destroy:
The virus will then hit at random, but only once. It will not replicate itself, mail itself to your friends or destroy any of your files, but instead provides you with moments of blissful surprise and magic.
See the video on Gizmodo.
I’m going to visit Troika this week to do a podcast for Core77. I’ll see if I can get infected.
(Via NOTCOT).
[tags]Troika, virus, macbook, play, playful[/tags]
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