This game was the culmination of a two part workshop I planned and led for 9 to 11 year olds through the LCRC after school program. This project is part of Artengine’s community arts initiatives and is funded by the Community Foundation of Ottawa. The first part of the workshop was focused on introducing the kids to basic electronics through the creation of LED-lit cubes. I augmented the design put out by Evil Mad Scientist to accomodate smaller, less coordinated fingers, cut out the aluminum traces and laid them out on adhesive sheets pre-workshop. Because there was a big range in their level and comfort with folding paper I brought an easier cut-out box to the first session as well.

I made a few quick drawings to help the kids understand what was happening with the battery and LED:

Then I let them choose which design they wanted to make. After testing the Foldie design many times I was able to work with the delicacy of the foil and paper fairly well, but the kids went through many ripped aluminum traces before being able to get it working.

Here’s one of the best examples from the kids:

And here are some alternate boxes the kids made:

The nice thing about the cut-out boxes was that the design allowed for drawing and coloring, while the design with the aluminum traces became too bulky with crayon and marker build up to fold and work properly.

In the second session I came back with a third design that involved no cutting and easy folding to form two halves of a box. After the kids finished we went into the gym to play a large-scale human version of the classic arcade game Pac-Man, where the kids became Pac-Men holding their bits of light as food and running away by following the lines of the gym from two kids appointed as ghosts holding nothing.

I was able to capture their movements through the light trails of the LEDs, which look like the erratic movements of very excited fireflies:

If they got tagged by the ghosts they had to sit down on the spot and not move until they were able to tag another Pac-Man within their reach. They played for an hour with a few change-ups of the ghosts.

After seeing them run through the darkness with lights stationary and moving it felt like being transported to an open field at dusk with the magic and wonder of the cosmos all around, if one could tune out the echoed endless shrieking.

We had a pretty lively crowd with luckily enough string cheese and Oreos to go around. There was some LOLing with Pong on an Arduino made by Jimmie Rodgers.

An awesome Tic-Tac-Toe game made out of wood by Schuyler Towne that will have locks to pick in each turn in order to place an X or O on the board.

I made Giant Snail Take Over- a papercraft game from a Mountain Dew box and some animals and town scenes I found online as well as some motorized props. The gameplay was recorded into a stop-motion papercraft spaghetti western movie on Youtube.

Darius Kazemi reworked his turn-based strategy game and posted a movie to Youtube.

Michael Carriere and K. Adam White collaborated on a game affectionately called RAAJOCBDFOTLSOTS made in Flixel, in which you run around and jump on cars but try not to fall off the left side of the screen!

Darren Torpey demoed an early-stage game he is going to bring into Facebook to log emotions and experiences and David Ludwig demoed his Ball Game, a puzzle based game made for the iPhone that uses the accelerometer feature for a ball to reach it’s target as well as his Falling Stuff screensaver he made in Box2D.

Last but not least Fahreddın Basegmez, one of the makers of Mekanimo- a free 2D physics simulator, and his son Dennis created Cows In Space.

All in all a very productive weekend!

This weekend DINO hosted a game jam and interactive project creation session that spanned both Saturday and Sunday. Typically the purpose of a game jam is for teams or lone creators to make a working project in either 24 or 48 hours. Sometimes there is a theme or things that you must incorporate into the piece you make.

Our jam was a bit more casual so I, not really knowing how to code, made a scene out of paper incorporating some creations from Cannon and Yamaha online papercraft communities. I made a short film of me playing with it stop-motion spaghetti western style with music from The Left Handed Gunfighter. I drank the give up beer after with relish.

This epic saga details the attempts of a lone defender of a town ransacked by giant snails. Will the townsfolk perish or will a savior come to the rescue? Watch and see.

Lauren McCarthy, winner of the Awesome Foundation- Boston grant for December wants to teach you some manners. Specifically, how to improve your social interactions for the betterment of all. Through three different handmade devices she proposes that the wearer will be happier, more focused and more personable in conversation.

The Happiness Hat works by jamming a tiny spike into the back of your head if the sensor resting on your cheek notices you are not smiling. The Anti-Daydreaming Scarf creates an intermittent vibration on the back of your neck once it senses you are in close proximity with a person to make sure you are paying attention. The Body Contact Training Suit fills your head with white noise through headphones that stops if it senses you’ve come into physical contact with another person.

Lauren created these wonderful/terrifying inventions with arduinos, heat radiation sensors, capacitance sensing circuits and servo motors. If you suffer from a lack of social graces no need to rely on etiquette books or awkward self-attempts at forced interacting- now you’ve got a dedicated helper on your side that will keep the ladies/men coming in droves to be your friend/date/love you. Bravo Lauren!

And in RIP My Love, pressing your fingers against the gravestone makes the ghost’s eyes light up with electric anger:

I’d like to explore this further and build an interactive childrens book around simple switches, buzzers and lights embedded in the art of the piece. So many wonderful projects to explore! So little time!

©2009 Google

My friend kittenthebad did a rally call to her friends the other day to join an Intro to Java class she was teaching on Google Wave. She had set up instructions ahead of time for people to download Eclipse and when the time came we proceeded through her slides and demos while she held an open dialogue on the wave for questions and comments. She was super thorough with her examples and I felt well taken care of and slightly more knowledgeable than when I came in!

All and all an interesting experience, though GW was running a bit slow and we griped that there wasn’t the Chrome browser for macs yet. It was easy enough to set up an additional training session by the yes/no/maybe invite event function in GW and the next class will focus on an Intro to Processing (<3). A really neat tool for people to connect and work together over distance/disinclination to change from pj’s.

I got to take part in a user study on the effectiveness of said table in the context of meeting to discuss and plan a fictitious business venture and the collective conclusion at the end of the study besides new heights of appreciative wonder of Seth was that besides the growing pains associated with learning a new technology, the table’s ability to record/photograph/allow freeform drawing/upload web content/shoot lightning bolts allowed for a deeper non-interfering analysis of  the interaction between people as they talk through their ideas. And yes, I *would* like one for my birthday thank you for asking.

CCC Play Video

A while ago I was the self-appointed minion to Jimmie Rodgers’ creepy cave crab project for Willoughby & Baltic’s Halloween show at the Charles River Museum of Industry. as you can see from this movie the crabs are indeed creepy and crabby and liked the dark. 

[A single hex schmitt trigger inverter IC to generate the sound, 2 RGB color change LEDs to generate the light and 8 photo resistors to sense the light all held together semi-neatly with friendly plastic and silver paint] 

Here’s the link!