National Survey on Teens and Video Games

The MacArthur Foundation reports on the results of a new national survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on kids video gaming habits. The main finding is in Pew’s headline: “Teens’ gaming experiences are diverse and include significant social interaction and civic engagement.”

My favorite finding:

Game playing can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.

We’ve been banking on this in some recent work we’re doing for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center to develop a physically and socially immersive video game experience that teaches young visitors about the impact they can have on society and the differences their actions can make.


posted September 16, 2008 by matt | permalink | Add comment

Cool new physics game

It’s interesting to see what folks are doing with Flash these days. This one touches on video game nostalgia as well as the whole educational game genre, so I thought it was appropriate to mention it:

FantasticContraption is a physics-based game where you create very simple physics devices in order to accomplish a goal ala the old “The Incredible Machine”. But it’s Flash-based, so you don’t have to download anything. And there are some interesting twists with water rods and wooden rods as construction pieces. Check it out, it’s very addictive!

Way back when we were developing the Progress Portfolio in the mid-90s, The Incredible Machine was a candidate investigation environment. We were looking for software environments where students were conducting extended investigations and would need to create annotated records of the work they were doing. The Incredible Machine almost fit the bill, but while it was based on Newtonian physics, it was difficult to get students to connect what they were trying to physics principles. Instead it just encouraged endless tweaking until something worked. While it may have been interesting to see how visual annotations (e.g. being able to point to something while talking/writing about it) would make it easier to create a record of your work in The Incredible Machine, we ended up working with investigations in Interactive Physics, which was much more connected to physics principals and less game-like. Interestingly, students had the same tendency to endlessly tweak.


posted September 11, 2008 by ben | permalink | Add comment

A rare glimpse into design rationale: Our GIS for History Project

Josh Radinsky just published a paper describing some of the design rationale for the GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for History project that we worked on together. He does a really nice job of explaining why the tool is the way it is. If you’re a hard-core GIS person, you might look at the web site and wonder why it seems so simple. But given our goal of designing a web-based tool that could be used by high school students in a one-week course, there was a strong need to cut back on many of the more advanced features that GIS provides and focus instead on a few key features that guide students to think about particular historical concepts.

The paper is published in the August 2008 issue of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, and is available online.

If you’d like to check out the GIS for History web site and mapping tool that we created, it’s live at: http://www.gisforhistory.org

Disclosure: I’m listed as a co-author.


posted September 10, 2008 by ben | permalink | Add comment

OS X 10.5.3 fixes what 10.5.2 broke

Just a quick note to OS X users. If you’re using 10.5.2, please upgrade to 10.5.3, which fixes the issue in InqScribe where floating windows could block mouse clicks in a sheet dialog.


posted June 04, 2008 by eric | permalink | Add comment

New InqScribe Resources web page

We’ve just added a new InqScribe resources page with useful links to a number of products and services to improve your InqScribe experience. You’ll find recommendations for digitizing services for converting your videotapes or media files, USB footpedals that provide convenient control of your media, and digital media recorders that record directly to InqScribe-friendly formats. (And if you use our referral links, you’ll be supporting future InqScribe feature development.)


posted April 07, 2008 by matt | permalink | Add comment

Sweating Design

Via ArsTechnica, a Business Week report on a session at SXSW on why great design is hard. In particular, the report highlights some really interesting design practices at Apple. Generating ten pixel-perfect alternative designs on the way to one final product sounds exhausting. The discussion of holding separate brainstorming and implementation design meetings, even late in the game, fits pretty well with our own take on iterative design. If you’re not willing to consider radical ideas, you’re producing an incremental design and you may end up boxed in a corner. (We just took a major UI zig on a project very late in the process, so I can report that this approach is not without pain, but we’re pretty happy with the result.)


posted March 13, 2008 by eric | permalink | Add comment

OS X 10.5.2 breaks a few dialogs

We’ve discovered that the OS X 10.5.2 update has caused a couple problems for InqScribe users.

Here’s the issue. If one or more floating windows are open (e.g. the Shortcuts window), then when a sheet dialog opens, the floating window gets sent all the mouse clicks that should be going to the sheet dialog.

(Sheet dialogs are dialog boxes that zoom out of the main document window. Other kinds of modal dialogs, like the Find dialog, are not affected.)

This is most noticeably a problem with the “Missing Media” dialog, where InqScribe asks you to click one of three buttons. But clicking doesn’t do anything. Argh!

The workaround is to close the floating windows. Once you do that, you’ll be able to click things in the sheet dialog again.

This bug seems to be OS X 10.5.2-specific. We’re quite curious whether 10.5.3 will fix what 10.5.2 broke, but we don’t intend to wait that long. We’ll get a new release out soon that resolves the problem.

Update: 10.5.3 does indeed fix the problem.


posted March 07, 2008 by eric | permalink | Add comment

MacArthur Announces Winners of Digital Media & Learning Competition

The MacArthur Foundation, which for a few years now has been supporting a $50 million digital media and learning initiative, just announced the winners of its innaugural Digital Media & Learning Competition. Seventeen winners in two categories shared $2 million in funding. According to the press release the “projects are expected to produce promising innovations and share new ideas within the emerging field of digital media and learning.”


posted February 21, 2008 by matt | permalink | Add comment

InqScribe 2.0.5

InqScribe 2.0.5 is primarily a bugfix release. Users with foot pedals will be happy to note that this version properly loads their foot pedal settings again. We’ve also made a few changes to the foot pedal wizard to make it smarter about clearing out old settings when you set up a foot pedal.

If you’ve been having trouble with foot pedal-based shortcuts, install this version and you should be set. If you have multiple shortcuts mapped onto the same foot pedal button (this may have happened if you ran the foot pedal setup wizard more than once) then you should run the foot pedal setup wizard one more time. In 2.0.5, the wizard will delete the duplicate settings for you.

Also of note: we’ve added support for 23.976 (or 23.98) and 59.94 fps time code formats. Here’s a complete list of what’s new.


posted February 11, 2008 by eric | permalink | Add comment

HyperCard lives!

Tidbits reported from MacWorld on TileStack.com, a new website from CodeFlare that can not only run existing HyperCard stacks, but it will also allow users to write their own web apps using HyperTalk. Not open to the public yet, but stay tuned.


posted January 31, 2008 by matt | permalink | Add comment

SimCity Societies helps explore climate tradeoffs

An interesting component of the latest installment of SimCity Societies, introduced back in November, is the ability to play out climate scenarios by designing cities that either expand or limit their greenhouse-gas contributions. Want to avoid coal powered electricity? Well, then you need to invest heavily in solar panels and wind power… which in turn drains your budget… better start funding research to make these alternatives cheaper. As you monitor the health of your city and the environment, you notice the environmental and economic impacts of your decisions and, significantly, the complexities of the tradeoffs.

For years, we’ve been involved in the design of software and curriculum to help students study the science of global climate change. We’ve found that once kids understand the science, they are perplexed as to why we’re not doing more to address the issue. The challenge has always been helping them understand the economic and social complexities that impact our everyday decisions (and this is often beyond the curriculum scope of the science teachers we work with). This game looks like a promising step to help kids explore these issues.


posted January 31, 2008 by matt | permalink | Add comment

Bug: Footpedal settings getting corrupted

Platforms affected: Macintosh + Windows
InqScribe Versions: 2.0.4 only

We've recently come across a bug in the latest version of InqScribe (v 2.0.4) where footpedals appear to suddenly stop working.

A typical problem: You've set up your footpedal, everything seems to be working fine. You quit InqScribe for the day, return later, start InqScribe, and all of a sudden your footpedal is no longer working. So you run the footpedal setup wizard again, and things seem to work...for a while, but soon it's corrupted again. You do this a few more times and the footpedals stop working altogether.

There are two problems here:

i. You have multiple footpedal assignments conflicting with each other as you run the wizard repeatedly.

ii. All of this is being caused by a bug we've just discovered where the saved footpedal settings get corrupted. This affects both the Macintosh and Windows versions.

We are actively working on an update that will fix this problem. Look for a new version soon.

In the meantime, here's what you can do to work around it. We know it's not ideal, but it'll get you working.

How to work around it:

Recommended method

The easiest way to work around this problem is to revert back to a previous version of InqScribe. Version 2.0.3 does not have this problem, so you can download and install that. Your license should work fine with it.

Mac Version 2.0.3
Win Version 2.0.3


Alternative method

If you have to use 2.0.4, then here's what you can do:

1. Reset your shortcuts

This will clear the corrupted settings.

(Note that this will delete all of your shortcuts, so you should write down any that you want to save first.)
a. Select "Edit->Edit Shortcuts..." from the menubar.
b. Click on the "Reset to Defaults" button.
c. When asked "Are you sure..." click "Reset".

(Alternatively, if you have a lot of shortcuts you've already defined, you can go through and delete every footpedal shortcut on the list in step b.)


2. Re-run the footpedal wizard

Reassign your footpedal with clean shortcuts.


3. Leave InqScribe open

The bug occurs when you quit InqScribe and the settings are saved. You can safely hibernate/sleep your computer and the settings will be retained, so long as you don't quit.


If you *have* to quit, then just reset the shortcuts and re-assign them again when you start up.


posted January 29, 2008 by ben | permalink | Add comment

InqScribe 2.0.4

Hot on the heels of the last point release, here’s InqScribe 2.0.4. This version fixes a couple more bugs for Windows users and also updates the built-in bug reporter to send us a bit more information about your current preferences and keyboard shortcuts. This saves us having to ask you for that information, and saves you from having to tell us, when you submit bug reports or feature requests. A win all around.

(You knew you could submit reports and requests from within InqScribe, right? Check the Help menu.)


posted November 18, 2007 by eric | permalink | Add comment

InqScribe 2.0.3

We released InqScribe 2.0.3 today. This is primarily a bugfix version; you can see the list of changes here.

Several of you have been using a beta version of 2.0.3 that expired last week. We apologize for any downtime between the expiration and this release.


posted November 05, 2007 by eric | permalink | Add comment

Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By...

It looks like something broke in the blogging plumbing. The net result is that blog titles are appearing but not the article content. In other words, if you can read this, the problem’s been fixed.


posted October 02, 2007 by admin | permalink | Add comment