TFT tennis: move your whole screen!

Today I visited STRP Festival in Eindhoven. This Art & Technology festival offers some great dance concerts (e.g. Chemical Brothers) and it is like they say "an exhibition of about 30 art robots and/or interactive art installations, a lot of video art and artistic video clips, various Live Cinema performances, several film and documentary showings, about ten talks and lectures by artists, workshops, and a number of other projects that fall outside the scope of the above-mentioned categories."


I always like the festivals on the former Philips premises. The atmosphere within the old factory buildings is special and the festivals are often very inspiring and creative.

Today I saw an installation of Dirk Eijsbouts called TFT Tennis. This was a new way of playing a digital tennis game. You really have to move your body and your TFT screen to hit the ball. Nice interface!

Watch this short impression, not a great quality, I shot it with my photo camera. You can find more on his website.

SPORE: "toys can change the world!"

Will Wright previews his new and exiting game, 'Spore'. Maybe the name doesn't ring a bell but sure 'SimCity' and 'the Sims' does. The creator of these sims is working on his new baby. Last year within Saganet we were already talking about this new concept.

Few interesting things:

1. this is a new example of participatory learning, you create your own universe;
   
2. Wright starts talking about his Montessori education;
   
3. he sees this as a learning toy;
   
4. the game holds some nice and easy object authoring tools;
   
5. Wright sees his new game as a way to educate young people about long-term effects of your actions;
   
6. nice saying: "Toys can change the world".

See this great TED-video:

Wii-learning?

After the battle of the game consoles has started I was wondering if the Wii from Nintendo has some promising potential for learning. With the controller you have to use your whole body/arms.

When we look at different ways we are remembering things, one of the memory types is the physical (bodily-kinesthetic) learning style (see also wikipedia about Kinesthetic learning). You use your body and sense of touch to learn about the world around you.

Would it be possible to use the Wii for more than just gaming? Maybe it would be possible to design some gamebased learning with the Wii? Can it be used e.g. for a course where you have to learn how to use certain physical machine. Or to extinguish a fire. Or....

Why not....put some extra flavour. Also a simulation used by pilots to learn how to fly is using this bodily-kinesthetic learning style to create contextualized, powerful learning.

Update: today Opera and Nintendo announced a webbrowser for the Wii. Download the browser from the site.

Kid using the Wii in a boxing game...what a joy!

Game event with presentations

Yesterday and today (and don't forget the nights!) there were different kind of activities around Gaming.

I skipped the LAN-party but joined some presentations to see if they were coming up with some valuable insights about gaming which can be used within game based learning situations.

Yesterday I saw a presentation about the history and future of gaming by Wouter Baars. Interesting but not that new to me. He is a technical guy and didn't have a lot of presentation skills.

Today I went to listen to Jeroen Jansz. A very interesting researcher from the University of Amsterdam. He is doing research about gaming for 3 years now and with a involving way of presenting he gave us some clear insights. He is proving what Steven Johnson is telling everybody: that gaming is not such a bad activity and can be very benificial. Keep an eye on his research...it is impressive!

For the Dutch readers: he also wrote the chapter about videogames in the excellent book from the SCP: Jaarboek ICT en samenleving, de digitale generatie (zie ook www.uitgeverijboom.nl).