Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom (1953)

Educational animation at its best, folks! Ward Kimball, at his best.
Can be viewed bigger over at Youtube.

The Great Flu.com

I haven't had a chance to play it because I think the site's servers are dealing with an epidemic of their own, but here's a game that teaches through simulation and play. Pretty great design, too.

via Kotaku

"While it might not actually be Swine Flu: The Video Game, a flash game created by Dutch researches aims to raise the awareness of similar outbreaks by having the player control the deadly Gamers Flu.

The Great Flu casts the player as the head of the fictional World Pandemic Control. Pick a strain of flu based on difficulty level, and use your budget to help stop the spread of a potentially deadly disease. Should you distribute masks to the public, or broadcast public service announcements warning of the potential update? Should you start manufacturing vaccines, improve research facilities, or bring in a group of specialists? Even at the lowest difficulty the game delivers a sense of just how difficult it is to handle and contain the spread of a dangerous virus."

Play here --> The Great Flu.com

also, a write-up on Fast Company.

A Loaf of Bread, a Container of Milk, and a Stick of Butter

A memorable Sesame Street animated short for sure (how could you forget?!) But seriously folks, check out this walk cycle. Here's a perfect case of the way a character talks and the way a character moves completely defining the character. It's also a perfect case of coming up with a great cycle (which definitely took time to create), and then getting a ton of use out of it.

According to YouTube, this was produced by Jim Simon's Wantu Enterprises, the same company that made equally distinctive animation for The Electric Company and Vegetable Soup.

Adventures in Cartooning

via BoingBoing

This fabulous book was just brought to my attention by Bill Gonzalez (thanks, Bill!). I haven't gotten my hands on a copy yet, but it appears to be one of the more creative and charming approaches to teaching comics that I've seen in awhile. Perfect for any aspiring cartoonist, young or old. And any fan of comics!

BoingBoing sums it up nicely:

"Adventures in Cartooning is a comic that tells the story of an elf who teaches a kid how to draw comics -- a kind of Understanding Comics for kids. It's incredibly charming and full of sly wit, and the combination of the story (and there is a real story here) and the instruction is perfect inasmuch as the story illuminates the techniques in the construction. Taking kids through the basics of layout, dialog, and doodling, Adventures in Cartooning is an inspiring text for any kid who loves comics, regardless of artistic abilty."

First Second Books offers a preview on their website --> here

Demanding the Grade

Just read an interesting article in the NYTimes:

--> Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

—that's not Brian ;)

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

I know I always worked hard for my A's in high school. The curve was much more prevalent in college, and I do recall certain students going up to the professor—disgruntled that they got a B. Average work deserves a C...there's no sense in inflating someone's sense of mediocrity. But it must be tricky at colleges, where students are often treated as customers because they are seen as paying for their education.

Questionaut

Gary passed a game on to me called Questionaut. It's a free game on the BBC's KS2 Bitesize site, described as the following: "Journey through strange worlds and test your knowledge of English, Maths and Science on this magical mission to recover your friend’s hat." It looks like it's by the same creative folks behind Samorost.

The game design is striking, and just like Samorost, involves a lot of click-based exploration. It's educational, but once you get into the game, you discover it's more of a pretty packaging for quiz format education. Not ideal, but each of the stages are related to the subject matter you get quizzed on. I enjoyed it—the quizzes seemed 6th grade level or so.

A couple things to point out in terms of Flash production: they are really clever about mixing beautifully rendered raster art with simple vector characters that are easy to animate because of their design. The sound design adds a ton, but the game doesn't take long to load at all. So they've definitely optimized everything well.

You follow a simple narrative as you travel from stage to stage, so overall, I think they've done a nice job of wrapping a story around a quiz game. And the puzzles you solve to get to the quizzes are also very pleasurable (to interact with, and watch). Nicely done!

J.K. Rowling on the power of failure

via Boing Boing:

J.K. Rowling's terrific commencement address at Harvard:

"The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure....

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,...Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way....Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned...."

Available as video and mp3 on Harvard Magazine's website.

What kids are searching for online

via eSchool News:

What are students searching the web for most frequently while at school? Turns out, it's math games, animals, and historic figures and events, according to an unscientific index of the 15 most popular in-school search terms released by Thinkronize Inc.

Here's the full list:

1. Games
2. Dogs
3. Animals
4. Civil War
5. George Washington
6. Holocaust
7. Abraham Lincoln
8. Multiplication
9. Math Games
10. Weather
11. Frogs
12. Fractions
13. Planets
14. Sharks
15. Plants

--I loved this quote:

I really think it says, 'I want something more than what I'm getting from my [textbook].'

Also glad to see Sharks still have their pull!
Thanks, Brian!

14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century

via Wired Science


18 engineers, technologists and futurists recently compiled a list of the challenges and goals that we face in the 21st century. Committee chair, William J. Perry, states "we chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and commitment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century." Here's the list:

• Make solar energy affordable.
• Provide energy from fusion.
• Develop carbon sequestration methods.
• Manage the nitrogen cycle.
• Provide access to clean water.
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
• Advance health informatics.
• Engineer better medicines.
• Reverse-engineer the brain.
• Prevent nuclear terror.
• Secure cyberspace.
• Enhance virtual reality.
• Advance personalized learning.
• Engineer the tools for scientific discovery.

While they are certainly all admirable and important, I noticed one towards the bottom that's up for grabs :)

Here is the page that specifically discusses personalized learning. A must read for all FableVisionaries!

Throughout the educational system, teaching has traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, with a single set of instructions provided identically to everybody in a given class, regardless of differences in aptitude or interest. Similar inflexibility has persisted in adult education programs that ignore differences in age, cultural background, occupation, and level of motivation.

In recent years, a growing appreciation of individual preferences and aptitudes has led toward more “personalized learning,” in which instruction is tailored to a student’s individual needs. Personal learning approaches range from modules that students can master at their own pace to computer programs designed to match the way it presents content with a learner’s personality.

Sound familiar?? For those interested, here's the official website: www.engineerchallenges.org

Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason," is genuinely concerned about a wave of anti-intellectualism she feels has taken hold of a certain segment of our country. A movement which she defines as an attitude that "too much learning can be a dangerous thing." In this article on NYTimes.com, she lays blame on a failing educational system:

"Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more."

She is also quick to attack an overwhelming national obsession with popular culture--that it has replaced the thirst for knowledge as a national conversation. Others in the article claim that the American pursuit of happiness (which they claim breeds ignorance) could "well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse." This is a pretty broad attack, and they're obviously not the first to offer this critique. But I thought I'd toss it out there, as we so often strive to be the guardians of education. What can we do to reverse this sentiment? Are we doing enough, how can we do more?

I Suck at Math and I can't Draw to Save My Life

On more than a couple occasions, even around the studio, I've noticed how people are very quick to throw up their hands when they have to do math. Some people wear it as a badge..."I can't do Math!" Or maybe a bumper sticker—a statement that they are proud to hate math and just as quick to write off any possibility of getting good at it. Interesting enough, people are just as quick to say that they aren't good at art. Why do you think this is? In one regard, they both occupy the polar regions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain: pure creativity versus raw logic. I think it's interesting that people are so quick to freeze and give up when asked to perform an artistic or mathematical task when the brain is wired to do both. One theory is that most people have had a bad experience with a math or art teacher.

We already have a spokesman on the art side—our very own Peter H. Reynolds. He's the champion of ishful thinking and gets energized when people say they can't draw. Well, Danica McKeller (better known as Winnie Cooper of the Wonder Years) just wrote a book targeted at teenage girls that makes a similar claim, the title being Math Doesn't Suck. She has a website to go along with it, too. Who knew she was a mathematician? She's basically a proponent of teaching math using a conversational approach and is also trying to erase the stigma that girls aren't good at math. Sounds like a great cause to me!

Blue Man Creativity Center

Via BuzzFeed:

Apparently the Blue Man Group just opened a creative school for 2- to 4-year-olds in New York City. They've rejiggered their live show into a preschool. Here's an excerpt from the New Yorker Article:

"Every day at the center will end with a ritual called Glow Time, during which the shades are lowered, the regular lights are turned off, and black lights are turned on, illuminating the parts of the room (including work created by the students) that have been painted with special UV paint. The collection of Blue Man-inspired educational gewgaws on hand is a far cry from flash cards and Play-Doh. There’s a hypnotic Bubble Machine, with kid-controlled colored lights; a futuristic Water Machine, with a mini-whirlpool; and a trippy installation, left over from the B.M.G.’s 2003 tour, of giant computer- animated dragonflies that can be made to light up, flap their wings, and fly."