Gaming+Tools

SPECIAL FEATURE: Dr. Mitchel Resnick Alan November invites you to listen to Dr. Mitchel Resnick from MIT Media Lab. This podcast was recorded at the Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston, MA July 2007. Dr. Resnick is the leader in gaming and programming, including SCRATCH. Click [|here] for the podcast!!

[|Spore] "With Spore, anyone can be creative - make whatever you can imagine with easy built-in Creator tools. Then create and guide your unique personal creature on an epic journey of discovery."

Wow! Here's a very cool site--[|20 Tools for Creating Your Own Games] "We all play games, but not many of us have tried to actually create games. Have you been scared due to all the programming knowledge you think it takes? Well, thanks to the wonders of the web, now there are numerous tools that enable almost anyone to create a video game. You can give it a try using the 20+ tools we gathered!"

Don't miss this one--[|Teaching Educational Games Resources] Tons of resources here!

[|Alice] "Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience." [Note: Alice is a PC only program.] ALSO SEE [|More on Randy Pausch]--Co-founder of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center and creator of Alice ALSO SEE [|Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center] "Our Mission 'Leadership in education and research that combines technology and fine arts to create new processes, tools, and vision for storytelling and entertainment.' The 'High Concept' ...The “high concept” behind both the Entertainment Technology Center and the Masters in Entertainment Technology degree is that we are based on the principle of having technologists and non-technologists work together on projects that produce artifacts that are intended to entertain, inform, inspire, or otherwise affect an audience/guest/player/participant. The masters degree is focused on extensive semester-long project courses. This focus allows us to tackle the much larger challenge of effectively bringing together students and researchers from different disciplines."

We do not intend to take artists and turn them into engineers, or vice-versa. While some students will be able to achieve mastery in both areas, it is not our intention to have our students master “the other side.” Instead, we intend for a typical student in this program to enter with mastery/training in a specific area and spend his or her two years at Carnegie Mellon learning the vocabulary, values, and working patterns of the other culture.

[|Computer Clubhouse] From MIT "At Computer Clubhouse after-school centers, young people (ages 10-18) from low-income commmunities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Clubhouse members work on projects based on their own interests, with support from adult mentors. By creating their own animations, interactive stories, music videos, and robotic constructions, Clubhouse members become more capable, confident, and creative learners."

[|Crickets] Create. Program. Play. From MIT "Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process."

[|Google Sketchup] Developed for the conceptual stages of design, Google SketchUp is a powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software tool that combines a simple, yet robust tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design. From simple to complex, conceptual to realistic, Google SketchUp enables you to build and modify 3D models quickly and easily. If you use Google Earth, Google SketchUp allows you to place your models using real-world coordinates and share them with the world using the Google 3D Warehouse.

[|Hook-Ups] From MIT "We are helping young people learn by constructing physical objects called "Hook-Ups" that can control games, animations, and other computer programs."

[|SCRATCH] Imagine. Program. Share. From MIT. Pretty cool! "Tile-based visual programming environment and toolkit, lets kids make games, animated stories, interactive art, and share with others on the Net."

From Wikipedia "Scratch is an interpreted dynamic visual programming language based on and implemented in Squeak. Being dynamic lets code be changed even as programs are running. It has the goal of teaching programming concepts to children and letting them create games, videos, and music. It can be downloaded for free and is being used in a wide variety of in-school and after-school settings around the world. Scratch's name refers to the turntablist technique of scratching, and refers to both the language and its implementation. Scratch is being developed by a small team of researchers in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.[1]" ALSO SEE Mobile Scratch [No web site available] From MIT "We are developing new software tools that enable kids to create interactive media for their mobile phones -- and to share their creations with one another. For example, kids can create interactive greeting cards that respond to input from keypad, microphone, or camera on mobile phones. Kids can then send their creations to their friends, and track how their creations spread through their networks of friends. To make these mobile creations, kids use a special version of Scratch, a graphical-programming language we designed especially for kids."

[|Second Life Grid] The Second Life Grid provides the platform, tools, programs, and support for educators, businesses, and organizations wishing to create interactive 3-D experiences within Second Life - the largest user-generated 3-D virtual world on the Internet.

What is the difference between Second Life and the Second Life Grid? Second Life is the virtual world WHERE end users can create an infinite variety of content and participate in a robust virtual economy. The Second Life Grid is WHAT makes Second Life possible: a platform with scalable server infrastructure, highly detailed and configurable features, customer service tools, programs to customize your user experience, and access to a massive existing base of end users and user-created content.