Hmm, almost a song for a for loop

If only Feist can add a little more to the song, it could be about a for loop doing a bit of i++...

Use Assassin's Creed 2 to teach art history

If you've read my previous posts, you know I'm a fan of art history, and I'm always looking for a more fun way to teach it.

Assassin's Creed 2 is a sequel to a very popular, and somewhat violent game, that takes place in Renaissance Italy. I remember one of the hardest things to do in an art history classroom is to visualize space and architechture without actually being there. AC2 fixes that for a fairly large chunk of art history curriculum.

There's gonna be Da Vinci, Florence, and Piazza San Marco, I mean look at the screen shots. You can walk around, kill things, and appreciate the architechture. Sure beats Rick Steves (and I like Rick Steves). This is a much better teaching tool than old slides from architecture books.

Even better, Venice looks like what it should have looked like in the time period.

Language learning via MMORPG

This is another HGSE project prototype where we explored what kind of educational game you'd get if you combined WoW with a Berlitz class.  We initially went the Carmen Sandiego route a little bit, but we realized that it didn't really have enough interaction with fellow language learners.  The final prototype was a semi-interactive Flash proof of concept.

Responsive Room

Responsive Room was a project for the Tangible Media class at the Media Lab.  It is designed to make reading a more immersive experience for kids.  It uses speech recognition and AI to determine the mood in the room, in our case, reading a story out loud.  You can also imagine this being used in any scenario where there's speech.  Based on the mood, the room changes color and provides appropriate music

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Shopucation

What's the best part about visiting a museum? The museum shop of course! This was a project I did for Shari Tishman's museum education class. We found out that a lot of the informal learning actually takes place in the museum shop, and visitors often takes something meaningful home with them.

Our group actually dipped our toes into retail, and mocked up a concept museum store where shopping and learning get together.