What Would Happen If A Nuke Hit Your Town? (Carloslabs via Google Maps Mania)

Google Maps Mania recently pointed out an interesting applet built by Carlos Labs (see below) that gives an estimate of the amount of damage a variety of nuclear devices would cause if set off somewhere in the world.

The applet uses the Google Maps API and allows the user to take a look at the thermal, pressure and fallout damage (based on wind direction) from a variety of preset yields. At the low end is the 6 kiloton device recently exploded by the North Koreans. At the other end is the Soviet Union's 50 megaton Tsar Bomba which would burn or blow down everything from Washington to Baltimore. Fat Man, Little Boy, suitcase bombs and the dinosaur-exterminating asteroid impact are thrown in "for fun".

(Note: The app does not allow me to pre-set the starting point. It seems to randomly rotate to large cities. If your city pops up in the display, please do not assume that I hate you...)



For us cold warriors this is pretty old news. We were exposed to these kinds of graphics for most of our lives. For the younger generation, I suspect it is a little unnerving.

Anyone want to stay up and watch Special Bulletin tonight?

Interesting Vision Of A Mixed Reality World Courtesy Of MS (YouTube)

Johnny Holland is a pretty cool and very well-written online design magazine. They were the first (that I saw) to pick up on this new vision of a mixed reality courtesy of Microsoft.



I spent a good bit of time last year looking into virtual worlds and thinking about their future. I had a lot of help, of course, from some of the brightest people I know, but, in the end, I came away less convinced that we are about to insert ourselves into the Metaverse than we are headed towards a mixed reality future.

In this vision, lightweight, transparent and mobile devices allow the user to project "overlays" onto the real world in real time. The net effect is a sort of heads-up display that will allow us to optimize our attention. This MS video gives an idea of how this might impact the way we do ordinary activities in a mixed reality world.

Link List (Games Education Summit 2009)

The Game Education Summit was really an eye-opener for me. It encouraged me to take a look at games in the classroom in a whole new way. If you are interested in some of the other posts in this series, you can see the list below:

Live-Blogging The Game Education Summit (Part 1)
What's In A Name? (Part 2)
Open Creativity (Part 3)
Brenda Brathwaite Is Amazing! (Part 4)
Innovative Teaching Through Game Design (Part 5)

Here are some other links that I found at the Game Education Summit that were interesting:

Game Education Network
Art Institute of Pittsburgh
Panda -- Free game design software
Alice -- Free game design software for beginners
RIP -- a Remix Manifesto
Workbookproject.com -- a social network for those who want to be creative in the digital age

Innovative Teaching Through Game Design (Games Education Summit -- Part 5)

(Note: I am still playing catch-up from a series of conferences I attended over the last several weeks. The post below is taken from notes done at the time of the Games Education Summit. I hope I captured the very good thoughts of the speaker, Ian Schreiber, accurately.)

Ian Schreiber spoke eloquently and at some length at the Games Education Summit about using the principles of game design to construct better learning experiences for our students.

He started his presentation by comparing Pokemon to the periodic table of elements. How is it, he asked, that children will happily remember all of the characteristics of all of the Pokemon characters but not be able to remember any of the characteristics of the periodic table of elements?

Both contain a wide variety of seemingly unrelated information and both are fairly complex yet children as young as 6 and 7 can remember all sorts of things about a Pokemon character and almost none about an element of nature.

What is it about the game that encourages and facilitates learning?

Schreiber did not pretend to have the answer. He readily admitted that game design had no real theory to speak of and made a point of mentioning that 90% of all games are essentially unsuccessful (in that they do not turn a profit).

He did think, however, that there might be some leads in the game design literature that would translate well into instructional design principles.

Specifically he mentioned 3 ideas, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's ideas of "flow", Raph Koster's Theory of Fun and Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek's 8 kinds of fun.

Csikszentmihalyi (a psychologist and not a game designer) argues that learning stuff at the right pace puts us in a "flow" mode that encourages us to learn more. If things are too easy we are bored. If things are too hard, then we quit. We need do-able challenges that allow us to progress, to learn and get better (see image at right). If we have this (or can find it on our own) then we are in the flow.

Schreiber joins this idea to games by way of Koster. Koster's Theory of Fun is as much about learning as it is about games and the book is a perfect segue from the more abstract ideas of Csikszentmihalyi to the world of games.

Finally, Schreiber points us to the 8 different kinds of fun (at least) that are out there. Specifically, these are: Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery, Expression and Pastime. It is important to understand that fun comes in a variety of sizes, e.g. learning that is "challenging" can also be "fun". Fun does not, in this way of thinking, equal easy.

Schreiber clearly stated that not all classes had to include all the elements of fun. He seemed to be recommending that considering these elements in the design of a class might increase the "fun" in the class and thereby increase the learning.

Beyond these three broad elements, Schreiber pointed to a few additional thoughts that seemed to me to be worth considering. First, he offered a quote from Sid Meier, the designer of the popular Civilization game series (among others): "A good game is a series of interesting decisions." Translating this to the classroom means that these decisions need to be decisions that the students make in the course of the class, not decisions the teacher makes for the students. Furthermore, these decisions do not necessarily have to do with content. Schreiber called the attempt, in some classes, to jazz up the content to make it seem more fun to be little more than "chocolate covered broccoli" (I love this term...).

Schreiber's ideas were thought-provoking and his presentation was well designed and easy to wrap your head around. For more of his ideas, he blogs at Teaching Game Design and
Game Design Concepts.