Understanding how to assess learning is a big topic in education today, and as games are coming to the forefront as a valuable education tool, people are starting to wonder what games might be able to say about assessment. Well, at Iridescent we’ve been wondering about that too. This past summer we offered an internship […]
I was inspired by Scot Osterweil’s recent presentation at GLS, in which he presented his four freedoms of play: Freedom to Experiment Freedom to Fail Freedom to Try on Identifies Freedom of Effort What makes this framework most interesting is that to Scot, these are not only the four freedoms of play, but also the […]
So at Iridescent, we like to live what we preach. We don’t just ask kids to make things from scratch, we do it too. Recently I decided that I needed a device to record myself playing games on my iPad (for a separate project to be talked about later). I had done this once before […]
Kids love games, but why do they hate educational games? The short answer is that most aren’t truly games, because being gamelike means a lot more than having flashy graphics and a point system. As an educational game developer, I think one of the most damaging aspects to this industry is when people call things […]
When I was on my high school debate team, we would discuss all kinds of philosophical principles “in theory.” I remember several discussions about Communism in which the common tagline was: “It was a good idea in theory, too bad it didn’t work in practice.” That phrase always bothered me. To me, a good idea […]
To me there are two aspects to data communication: aesthetics and functionality. Aesthetics is obvious, it’s the visual appeal of a graphic, but functionality is less obvious. Graphics have a functional purpose, which is to highlight patterns and trends in data in a visual way. A graphic is functionally successful when it is easy to […]
The L.A. Youth Hack Day Challenge kicked off national Computer Science Education Week as part of Hour of Code—a massive movement to introduce 10 million students to computer science. Technovation partnered with the UCLA Community School, Hack for LA, and Girls in Tech LA to bring together over 80 volunteers, students, and mentors for the […]
By: Samantha Quist, Technovation Senior Director Registrations for Technovation 2014 are officially open and you can sign up today! Like last year, we challenge this year’s teams to develop an app that solves a problem in their local community in one of the three following categories: Creating apps for local organizations Teen issues (suicide, peer […]