Apparently there is a goal for all patterns and their products. IIt has been deemed “the quality without a name” (QWAN for short) by an architecture professor at Berkeley, and it gives overwhelming beauty and value to a structure. It incorporates symmetry, balance, wholeness, order, cognitive resonance, and a few more things. This QWAN goes [...]

A definition of “pattern” = “A pattern is a named nugget of insight that conveys the essence of a proven solution to a recurring problem within a certain context amidst competing concerns.” (from Brad Appleton’s Patterns and Software: Essential Concepts and Terminology) I hope my team and I come up with a friendlier definition when [...]

I have just started doing the background reading for my WebQuest (Pattern Language for Game Design) and I think I’ve already got brain overload! My understanding of patterns prior to these readings was based on my experiences as an elementary school teacher (“Can you arrange your tiles in a red/green/red/green sequence, class?”) and from the [...]

Do any of you play Quake? It’s a hugely popular first-person shooter game. In my ongoing quest to channel things that are popular into more educational roles, I’ve been wondering if the various Quake editors out there could be used to make a game that was more benign yet still fun. Just came upon this [...]

I just visited the CoolQuiz site for the first time. [http://www.coolquiz.com/]. CoolQuiz has trivia-type, multiple-choice questions in a zillion categories, mostly about pop culture. The basic structure is that you get to keep answering questions until you get 3-5 wrong, depending on the quiz. Motivationally, the only reason to keep going is to get yourself [...]

Wow, look at this stream of blogs from everyone! Guess everyone is waiting for the weekend… Well here’s my first post. I’m part of the Game Bots group. I’ve looked over a few of the webpages now, but not all. Two things strike me: The first page I looked at was just a list of [...]

Don’t mind me, I’m just posting this to see how it works.

Wow! Thanks to a link from another blog (Dave Winer’s Scripting News) I just learned about a new company/site named Skotos. Here’s how they describe themselves: About Skotos Tell Me A Story: Stories live within our hearts. Through them we immerse ourselves in the tales of events and people we do not know; we see [...]

FYI – a local company, Interact, which makes educational simulation games http://www.interact-simulations.com/

To inaugurate this blog about educational games, here’s a paper I just happened across that grapples with the concept of fun in the context of software design. http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/fun.html The premise of the article is that there are three different cases in which it might be important to concern yourself with making software “fun”: 1) where [...]