Games For Learning Institute + Ken Perlin

General Discussions
#1

Hi,

I’m really interested in games for education, and I recently found this ‘Games For Learning Institute’, an independent research arm of NYU funded by microsoft.

Apparently Ken Perlin works at this place! 8) Pretty cool. Have you guys heard much about it?

#2

I hadn’t heard about it. Definitely relevant to my interests, thanks.

#3

pardon my ignorance but who is Ken Perlin?

#4

Of Perlin noise fame
http://cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/

#5

ah nice, seems like he’s written a ton of java applets.

#6

But he’s mostly famous for noise.

#7

What are your interests if you don’t mind me asking? Do you do any work on education games?

#8

Thanks for asking. It’s always nice to be acknowledged…

I’ve been doing some work for Goldsmiths college, in collaboration with biologists from Imperial, on a kind of interactive toy protein folding system that was the basis of my masters thesis. That’s been unfunded for a while; a situation we’re looking to remedy…

We’re thinking of changing it into more of a game than a toy (an idea I first mooted a while back but which no-one seemed to take seriously until someone else suggested it recently ::)), probably based more on docking rather than folding.

There’s not much in the public domain at the moment, but you can take a look at http://foldsynth.com

For a while I was focussed on experimental music and audio-visual art type stuff… that’s what made me get into programming. I don’t know much about biology; working on FoldSynth has been a good way of having something concrete and collaborative to work on, rather than getting lost in overly abstract ideas (the science is also very interesting of course). I’m not really so interested these days in trying to call myself an Artist though… and am getting more back into games…

I’d like to get people involved in making things with computers and generally promoting computer literacy (as opposed to Apple-esque user / engineer polarisation); AFAICT glancing at your SlaveBot work, our interests intersect in some ways. How would you answer the same questions you asked me?

p.s. my avatar is taken from an old FoldSynth screenshot.

#9

Sounds cool, yes I know what you mean about the engineer/designer divide. They use adobe/apple stuff and we use clunky programming.

I’m a teacher and I’d really like to make computer games that teach stuff, especially maths. But in a fun way. Most games are carrot and stick, like do some maths so then you can play the fun game. I want to make a game where the maths is the game. Haven’t got a prototype yet, but working away…