These are the times of quiet revolt (very quiet) in the First World, where men and women declare their freedoms subtly, semi-publicly, playfully. Witness the the Credit Card Prank, where one man, seeking to test the limits of his accountability, discovers that he can sign his credit receipts just about any way he wants to. In fact, more than just about.
This may not be a giant leap for mankind, or indeed a small step, but it is a clear and present demonstration of play power. Just a little playful prodding here and there, a little, just-for-the-fun-of-it-all testing of the rules, and we quiet revolutionaries discover, if you forgive the expression, yet a little more freedom, and yet another reason to wonder about the sanity of it all.
Smart Fun, part two: walking drunk and related concerns
You'd think that this little, pointless exercise in seeing how far you can get a drunk guy to walk before he falls over is, though significantly amusing, more than vaguely familiar, and surprisingly challenging, little more than an exercise in, um, pointlessness. Howsomever, as my scientifically informed correspondent Ianus Keller gleefully points out, it's more. Far more.
It is in fact a demonstration of Control Theory. I quote from the aforementioned:
Some machines are easy to control, others are difficult. As a child we learn how to point in the direction of something we want, and we can do that without difficulty. But landing a helicopter on a helipad takes extensive skill and training...Control theory is a branch of science that deals with questions like when and how hard should the driver of a train apply the brakes in order to halt at the precise spot at the platform. Continuous control systems...are characterized by their order. A finding with important implications for interface designers is that people can be good at controlling positions, velocities, and accelerations. Technically these are known as zeroeth, first, and second order control systems, respectively. Beyond second order, things get very difficult indeed.
For a playworthy, but significantly less playful demonstration of control theory, see this little demo.
Getting these links from Ianus right before I posted yesterday's piece on the mathematical depths of the Simpsons is a dip beyond serendipity - as instructional about the nature of fun as it is about the experience of learning.
"The Simpsons...contains over a hundred instances of mathematics ranging from arithmetic to geometry to calculus, many designed to expose and poke fun at innumeracy. In fact, Al Jean, Executive Producer and head writer, has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University."
Who knew? Dr. Sarah J. Greenwald, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC and Dr. Andrew Nestler, Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, CA, who produced simpsonmath.com.
Child genius to Bart: Tell you what, Bart, I'll trade you the weight of a bowling ball on the eighth moon of Jupiter for my lunch, for the weight of a feather on the second moon of Neptune from your lunch.
Another child genius to Bart: I'll trade you 1000 picoliters of my milk for 4 gills of yours.
3. Teacher at gifted school: So y = r^3/3 and if you determine the rate of change in this curve correctly, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
[Class laughs.]
Teacher: Don't you get it, Bart? Derivative dy = 3r^2 dr/3, or r^2 dr, or r dr r. Har-de-har-har! Get it?
This site does makes two very instructive points: 1) it is the depth of the cartoon series that makes it so much fun for so many people, and 2) things that we think of as "pure entertainment" may, given the intelligence of the writers and the insights of the instructors, also lead to learning.
Thanks for this highly entertaining and yet significantly educational connection go to Ultimate Insult
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as Kayak Polo. And no, I hadn't heard of it either until I clicked across this from the Springfield News Sun (subscription required):
"The sport, with roots in Europe, is growing in popularity all over the country. Places such as San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and San Diego have active clubs. Austin, it seems, is a natural for it because of its mild climate. Scrimmages unfold every Wednesday night under the MoPac Boulevard bridge. Addicted players hit the water year round, even in January.
"Donning helmets and face masks, they use kayaks modified with blunt noses and rubber bumpers, all the better to avoid cracked ribs if a player is T-boned by a kayak. Team members chase down the ball, which they pass to one another and heave into suspended goals. Think water polo on kayaks, with a 5-second time limit on players holding the ball with their hands. They also push the ball through the water with their paddles or flip it onto the bow of their kayaks...
"Depending on what you read, the game started in Scotland, Germany or England sometime around the late 1800s, when bored dockworkers rigged barrels with wooden horse heads, tails and saddles, grabbed paddles and batted around a ball for amusement...Today, the game is still most popular in Europe, where it's known as canoe polo, although players use what Americans call kayaks."
Found this amazing wooden bike thanks to the ceaseless and intrepid curiousity of the folks at Grow-a-Brain. And it made me remember how much more a bike is than a mode of efficient transportation, how, when I was young enough, my bicycle could take me to outer space and then down, down, down to the ocean depths.
Then there's the wooden part. The wonderful, sensous heft of it all (and we're talking hefty: more than 50 pounds). Which, of course, is the antithesis of what you want out of a bike. Unless, of course, you're not really concerned about speed and liftability and the like.
The story of the Amazing Wooden Bike Company is a story of art, craftsmanship, and, above all, a deep sense of play. The result is an invitation to wonder, which, once you get beyond the sheer practicality of human-powered transportation, is what biking is all about.
e-playing and e-learning: integral fun and meaningful failure
eLearning magazine recently ran an article called "Online Learning and Fun." It is somewhat encouraging to find educators who are, despite the intense pressure for academic justifiability, championing fun. There were a couple insights in the article that I found especially heart-warming.
The first: "The classic approach in e-learning is to add a bit of fun later, rather than designing learning experiences to facilitate a joy of learning, where the learning process itself is fun." That is definitely it, in a very compact nutshell. When fun is added after the fact, it is more often than not a denial of the fun inherent in the experience of learning.
And this: "...the concept of meaningful failure. A player learns through trial and error and especially from mistakes, trying a different approach to accomplish the task at hand. Games often provide multiple opportunities and methods for a player to succeed. If a player fails using one approach, there are other ways to solve the problem. e-learning can leverage this gaming approach, offering multiple means of solving problems to encourage exploration and learning from failure."
Yeah and again yeah. I call it "learning by dying" and I think it's probably one of the most powerful contributions that eplaying has for elearning. The most fun and efficient way to master most computer games is to play until you get killed, and remember what killed you. You usually have a few lives to sacrifice to learning. And you can always start over. This approach to learning has given most young people so much confidence in their competencies that, when confronted by a new game or new technology, they hardly ever need to look at the instructions.
These are essential messages for those of us who are aware of the arbitrariness and downright silliness of the separation between learning and fun.
When Googling for children's games, you never know what morsels of merry mentation you might find. Sometimes, they seem to come from deep within. Case in point, Waca Waca, from:
Erin Marie Panttaja
Sugar House Lane
Bellevue, Dublin 8, Ireland
of Media Lab Europe
The "Waca" (<) is the thing you hit when you forget to take your finger off of the Shift key at the end of a sentence. Proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters <> is "waca waca" Here is some poetry for you.. The text of the poem follows:
I received this poem over email from my Grandmother last week. It presents a puzzle, challenging the reader to guess a way to read the poem in order to make it sound like a poem. Interpreting the poem is an asynchronous activity, but nonetheless could spawn interaction as users tried to create similar puzzles for one another.
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
Always delighted to see evidence of the junkyard sportly, I invite you to join me in celebrating the following find:
Every school culture has a way of arriving at its own games of eccentric ingenuity. Found objects in the environment - a set of steps, a stick, a trash can, a ball of any kind - are inspiration for play, for sport, and for the relationships they weave. And Ralph Wales, my colleague for nine years, is my archetype of the school-game inventor.
First there was Brolf. Ralph and his sixth-graders would tee off from their classroom porch using dilapidated brooms, the bristles wound with a regulation 36-inch length of duct tape, and deflated volleyballs. Had to be deflated. The "pin" was the willow tree down in the swamp by the studio, and a good Brolfer could make it in, say, eight strokes, weather permitting. Brolfers are undeterred by wind, snow, sleet, or rain.
Then came Brockey, a hybrid of equal parts brooms, hockey rules, and the circus, which often turned into low and muddy fooling around when the teams of six faced off in the spring muck to try to drive the lightweight six-inch plastic ball through the regulation clown-shoe goals. The teachers who played this every day with the eighth-graders often wore foul-weather gear; however, many a post-recess class was conducted with squelching feet.
When it came to plunger ball (plumber's helpers, softball, two toilets - tankless), the school headmaster had to draw the line. The parents conducting admissions tours were hard-pressed to explain away the toilet "goals" in front of the library. Headmasters are contractually obliged to be Wonkham-Strongs on occasion.
"By typing in a text of any kind you can get it sung for you by some of the world's great-est pop stars. A database of sung words has been built up and is supposed to be gradually growing through the users' own interaction. If you find a word missing in our sound vocabulary, just tell us, and we will extract the word from a song of your choice, and add it to our database."
It's called "LET THEM SING IT FOR YOU." And it kinda really works (1400 words worth). It's kinda fun to hear those one-word-song-snippets. And you can even email your song-collage to everybody.
And I was thinking how this kind of Internet-enabled play taps into the collective semi-conscious, growing in usefulness with use, so to speak, becoming more fun as more people have fun with it. Cool.
Developed by Eric Bunger, sound artist, for the Swedish Radio.
Dice are probably as old as culture. In one form or another, dice have been since man first became aware of the diceyness of life. (For previous DeKoven dice-significance-expounding, see Chance and Odds - accounting for the wild things in nature). There are probably thousands of different games that use dice. And, given the many, many pages in Kevin Cook's Dice Collection, probably almost as may different kinds of dice.
And therein lies a most empowering find for anyone who likes to play more or less abstractly with fate - because all these amazingly odd-shaped dice (he has counted 75 different shapes so far), and these dice with different combinations of dots and numbers and letters and pictures and colors, combine to provide a fathomless treasury of fate-tempting games and game ideas.
Take a look, for example, at some of the dice available through Koplow Games: place value dice, decimal dice, interrogative dice, money dice, parts of speech dice. And, lest you think this is all some educational ruse, click on over to Koplow's Double Dice - the old die-within-a-die game, where the outer-die meets the inner-die to add or subtract, multiply or divide, match or differ.
Can't wait to get your hands on one of these new, fun-enticing dice forms? Well then, think of thanking Mr. Cook personally for his small but print-and-playworthy collection of Paper Dice.
You take, you know, art, like for example Mondrian's serendiptously computer-game-looking Broadway Boogie Woogie, and you marry it with something as close as possible to like, well, Pac Man, and you get what apparently only can be called PacMondrian. I quote:
Pac-Mondrian transcodes 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' into a Pac-Man video game: the painting becomes the board, the music becomes the sound effects, and Piet Mondrian becomes Pac-Man.
Pac-Mondrian disciplines the syncopated rhythms of Mondrian's spatial arrangements into a regular grid, then frees the gaze to follow the viewer's whimsical perambulations of the painting: a player's thorough study of the painting clears the level.
Each play of the game is an act of devotion. Mondrian's geometric spirituality fuses with his ecstatic physicality when Pac-Mondrian dances around the screen while the Trinity of Boogie Woogie jazz play 'Boogie Woogie Prayer'.
Each play of the game is an improvisational jazz session. Pac-Mondrian sits in as a session drummer with Ammons, Lewis, and Johnson, hitting hi-hats, cymbals, and snares as he eats pellets.
The thing is, it's fun, and it's got something to do with art.
These are the times of quiet revolt (very quiet) in the First World, where men and women declare their freedoms subtly, semi-publicly, playfully. Witness the the Credit Card Prank, where one man, seeking to test the limits of his accountability, discovers that he can sign his credit receipts just about any way he wants to. In fact, more than just about.
"The 
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as Kayak Polo. And no, I hadn't heard of it either until I clicked across this from the 
Found this amazing 
You take, you know, art, like for example Mondrian's serendiptously computer-game-looking