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Comment You only get to do it ONCE: (Score 1) 160

by kulakovich (#28960199) Attached to: What's In an Educational Game?
Hi anonymous reader: I used to work in a very similar situation here in the states. I will tell you what I said at an exec meeting that carried a lot and still holds true with this genre: Make it fun; you only get to bore a kid once.

Goodluck, contact me if you want to talk about any of this.

kulakovich

Comment take a look at alice.org (Score 4, Interesting) 634

by kulakovich (#28818519) Attached to: The Best First Language For a Young Programmer
http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=what_is_alice/what_is_alice

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course."

kulakovich
Government

California Continues To Push For Violent Game Legislation 167

Posted by Soulskill from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed,-you're-probably-california dept.
Back in February, the US Court of Appeals shot down a California law that banned the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. Shortly thereafter, State Senator Leland Yee petitioned the US Supreme Court to review the case. Now, along with California's Psychiatric and Psychological Associations, Yee has filed an amicus curiae brief with Court that elaborates on the reasoning behind the law. Within the brief (PDF) are some interesting quotes: "Parents can read a book, watch a movie or listen to a CD to discern if it is appropriate for their child. These violent video games, on the other hand, can contain up to 800 hours of footage with the most atrocious content often reserved for the highest levels and can be accessed only by advanced players after hours upon hours of progressive mastery. ... Notably, extended play has been observed to depress activity in the frontal cortex of the brain which controls executive thought and function, produces intentionality and the ability to plan sequences of action, and is the seat of self-reflection, discipline and self-control." The video game industry has filed its own amicus brief to dispute Yee's claims.

Comment Arguably, we already do. (Score 3, Insightful) 398

by kulakovich (#28586849) Attached to: We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?
Given the following points:

1. Student pay ridiculous prices for half-useful photo-laden authoritative textbooks, only to sell them back to the publisher-run book resale cartels for 10% of the price they paid.

2. With the current trend of Big Copyright, every written work must have an owner/copyright holder. Therefore, you do not own the books you have copies of.

I own my experience of the book, or the movie, and put forward that those experiences, being mine, grant me ownership of the work as my experience as much as the money I paid for the 400 pages of paper and ink.

We will look back to the beginning of the 21st Century and laugh at this Information Prohibition.

kulakovich
The Internet

News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic 387

Posted by kdawson from the off-to-neverland dept.
miller60 writes "Major news sites struggled to remain online yesterday evening as news of Michael Jackson's death triggered huge waves of Internet traffic. TMZ.com broke the news and was quickly overwhelmed, while Twitter turned off features to handle its load. They weren't alone. Keynote Systems reports that ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, and Yahoo! News all experienced performance problems between 6:15 and 9 pm Eastern time, when the average availability of news sites tracked by Keynote dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The cloud computing crowd immediately jumped on the traffic jams to argue their case. 'Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn't just wrong — it's idiotic,' wrote one cloud blogger."

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