Category: Uncategorized

Most of us can remember days at school when teachers would treat us to a game of Bingo. We may also wind up playing quite a bit of Bingo at the opposite end of life too. But why Bingo? As games go, Bingo is one of the worst. The “player,” if we can even call… Continue reading Roll & Writes and the Classroom

Print-and-Play games, which can be easily printed out with a simple desktop printer, seem like they’d be a major player in educational game development considering how crucial printed and copied materials are to teachers. Most of us who started elementary school after the copy machine became widely available will remember the endless flow of worksheets… Continue reading Print-and-Play Games and Education

I recently picked up Benjamin Stokes’s new book, Locally Played: Real-World Games for Stronger Places and Communities. The book discusses how local communities can leverage their own games as well as commercially-available games to foster civic engagement among their residents. Dr. Stokes is a civic media scholar and the director of the Playful City Lab… Continue reading Review: Locally Played by Ben Stokes

As of the time of this writing, statues and memorials of Confederates, slave-owning politicians, explorers, and even U.S. Presidents are being taken down from public places around the country either formally by city officials or informally by demonstrators. The scenes of crowds tearing down these statues are reminiscent of German crowds hammering the Berlin Wall… Continue reading Public Monuments and Mixed Reality

In my first year of grad school, I took a class on using virtual reality and augmented reality for educational purposes. When my classmate and I originally developed a virtual reality version of Theater of the Oppressed, we envisioned that it would be used for groups that were geographically very far apart or actors and… Continue reading Theater of the Oppressed and Virtual Reality

The topic of our final project was to make “the intangible, tangible.” We had been using a number of different sensors over the course of the semester such as the noise sensor, flame sensor, and others. Any of these could have been used to develop this project, but I wanted to develop something that utilized… Continue reading Final Project Design

Our current assignment required using two microbits (or a microbit and the microbit app on a smartphone) and a sensory input device. Since I’m a game design major, I decided to use a joystick for my sensory input. I had originally planned to create a two-player game where one player would use the device with… Continue reading Working with two micro:bits

I created an unboxing video for the micro:bit where I explain a bit about how the device works and what can be done with it. I looked through a number of suggested projects, and I decided that a magic 8 ball program looked interesting to me. When I actually coded it to begin with though, I… Continue reading First try with the micro:bit

This week we have moved on to making circuits using conductive thread sewn into fabric. Our assignment was to incorporate a circuit that, when completed, would light up LEDs. While I could have just taken a simple piece of fabric and sewn some LEDs into it, I decided that I wanted piece of fabric to… Continue reading Sewing Circuits into Fabric

For my paper circuits project, I decided to make a Halloween-themed card that would have glowing LED eyes when the card was opened. I had to think of a way to complete the circuit when the card opened. I decided to use two pieces of card stock taped to the inside folds. One would be… Continue reading Working with Paper Circuits