At last year’s SXSWi, much of the game talk was about casual game development, the notion that it didn’t take much to throw together a video game, and that any technologically inclined person could do it. I suppose that this talk was spurred by all the iPhone games that had been thrown together in a week and were raking in thousands of dollar a month on the iTunes store.

At one panel on casual game development, the moderator asked the panelists, “Do you think that you have to know [the programming language] C in order to develop a game?” C is the programming language of choice for game development and other applications. It is not an easy language to learn or to apply. The unanimous answer from the panel to the moderator’s question was, “Well, yes! How could anybody develop a game if they didn’t use C?” I found that opinion echoed over and over at the conference. Casual game development is only casual if you are a hard-core programmer.

“What about kids?” I wanted to ask. I was thinking about Logo, a computer language developed in the late 60s by Seymour Papert (at the MIT AI Lab) and Wally Feurzeig (at BB&N) specifically for kids. Papert hooked Logo up with a graphic turtle that wandered about the screen laying down a track, all under program control. Logo has been developed in many versions and directions, such as StarLogo, which gave programmers as many turtles as they wanted.. Even easier to use is a logo-based programming environment known as Scratch that makes writing programs for turtles (which look like cats in Scratch) as simple as drag-and-drop.

About the same time Alan Kay at Xerox PARC was worked out the principles of object-oriented programming and embodied them in the SmallTalk programming language. Kay always had is eye on kids as programmers and his latest effort along these lines is a SmallTalk based system known as eToys.

Somewhere in between SmallTalk and eToys, Apple Computer’s Andy Hertzfeld developed a product known as HyperCard that brought some features of object-oriented programming to just plain folks, including kids who wanted to make games. Tilestack is a cool web-based version of HyperCard that you or your kids can use to program up games.

Apple’s Advanced Technology Group also developed a development environment known as Cocoa (which should not be confused with their current OS X development system of the same name). Cocoa was like HyperCard on steroids. It gave kids an environment that they could populate with scenery, objects, characters, and the like. Each of these could be given behaviors with a visual programming language that was so simple that it didn’t even look like a programming language. Cocoa was never released, but it lives on in a much cooler version marketed by StageCast Software Inc., and known as StageCast Creator. It’s a great system for making games (but it really needs a better name).

StageCast Creator was not the only object-oriented programming system that showed up in the 90s. Andrew Reppening, who teaches computer science at the University of Colorado, introduced an system called AgentSheets. AgentSheets has been a great hit among kids and teachers and is the basis of an ongoing research project called Scalable Game Design that is devoted to teaching kids how to program. Of course, from the kids’ view, this program gives them the chance to make their own games instead of doing their homework.

No mention of game programming for kids would be complete without mention of Alice, a project started by the late, and deservedly famous, Randy Pausch of Carnegie-Mellon Univiersity. Alice, unlike the other programming systems mentioned above, has its roots in the video game industry, and hence can be used to produce drop-dead gorgeous 3D video games. Still, like the other programming systems, it’s built from the ground up to be used by kids, and to teach them something about programming.

Why did all of these marvelous little game factories escape the notice of everyone at SXSWi last year? I don’t know, but I intend to fix that this year by putting together a panel on game development for kids. You can help make this happen by going to my proposal on SXSWi’s panel picker, voting for the panel, and, if you like making trenchant comments. Please act quickly; the panelpicker closes on September 4. If the panel makes, and if there is enough interest, Twist Education will buy a booth at ScreenBurn just to show off some of the marvelous games developed by kids who don’t know C.

Story 1 is about distance learning. In case you don’t know, distance learning is what happens when an organization decides to offer its classes to students that aren’t physically present in the classroom. So it puts a TV camera on an instructor and streams the video to wherever the students are. Just to make it interesting the technology allows students to ask questions and otherwise interact with the instructor.

There was a time when this distance-learning stuff was brand new. So the Air Force engaged a company that I worked for to do an experiment in “advanced, computerized” distance learning. This meant that, apart from everything going over IP (and this was around 1998, mind you) that the instructor had a number of whiz-bang devices available to her, devices like an electronic white board, and a slide show capability. It also meant that each student had his or her own computer, with headsets so that they could listen to the audio stream and contribute to it. The instructor’s computer had all sorts of knobs and buttons so that she could call on students, listen to individuals, even form subgroups of students.

The IP part of the study never got working, but the research team (led by a colleague of mine) was able to study a quasi or virtual advanced computerized distance learning setup by stringing wires from one room of a building, where the instructor was, to another room, where the students were. So the instructor, who was a real instructor, could try to teach a real course to real students.

It was that real instructor-real student-real course nature that made this experiment so interesting. I asked the guy running it how things were going. “Not good,” was his answer. As it turned out, two interesting things were going on, one in the instructor’s room, the other in the student’s room.

The designers of the system had made sure that the instructor could style just about any interaction that she wanted with the students. Anything she did in a real classroom, she could do in her special virtual classroom. The problem was, all the normal face-to-face control mechanisms such as hand-raising, gesture, and gaze had been replaced with buttons and menus and other geegaws. No longer could she point to a student or throw a glance his way. Instead of being able to physically shuffle through overheads, she had to master the arcane controls of PowerPoint. As the result, she was either struggling the technology or ignoring it. In the end became a talking head that used only a fraction of the capabilities available to her.

Here’s what happened in the student room. In a normal classroom, indeed, in any social situation, conversation is the order of the day. I ask a question. If you know the answer, you’ll volunteer it. If you hear something you don’t understand, you turn to your neighbor. Someone starts a discussion. Others join in.

But what if I set each of you up in front of a display and hang a headset on you. What if I put every student in the room on line. As you can guess, once these students were on-line, they were no longer off-line. Normal classroom discussion came to an abrupt end. Whatever interaction there was among students occurred only through the network under the control of the instructor, who was less than skilled at managing the conversational facilities at hand.

In this environment technology was intrusive. It channeled communication down a narrow path in a way that subverted normal conversational mechanisms. I decided, for control purposes to look at a few videos that we had taken of conventional classroom training. The conventional setting, it turns out, affords a surprisingly rich suite of mechanisms for controlling conversation and attention: gesture, glance, body language, prosody, and physical position, to name a few. All of these mechanisms are used really without thinking on the part of either instructor or students.

What this story brings home to me is the importance of affordances in the classroom, and in other social situations. What are affordances? The easiest way to define them are capabilities run through the wringer of perception. The affordance of a fire hydrant to humans is that of a firefighting tool. To a dog it is that of a message center.

The quasi distance learning lab had all of the capabilities of a conventional classroom, but none of its affordances. Putting a headset on a student does not remove her ability to converse normally with other students, but it does remove the affordance for doing so. Once the headset is on, conversation is no longer in her perceptual space of possibilities.

The lesson here is that the classroom, the lecture hall, the meeting room are remarkably resilient tools for education and other social enterprises, but that messing around with those mechanisms in uninformed ways can have nasty unintended consequences.

However, messing around with classrooms in uninformed ways can sometimes have wonderful unanticipated consequences, one of which I’ll describe in my next blog post.

Twist Education is committed to advancing the interest of learning science by developing adventure games that teach science. We are working to develop a web presence that is a fun place to explore science concepts, and games that will take the student on an engaging adventure that will, ultimately, teach them science. Along the way, the student should: learn complex scientific and technical concepts; gain understanding of the “invisible” phenomena related to science; and have fun learning.

Have you ever felt that all the experiences you have in life seem to be leading you to a particular point? A Pinnacle?

I have.

One day, after living through difficult experiences and a particularly frustrating period in my work life, I made a plan. The plan was simple: to manage a large-scale project before the end of the 2008. When the end of the year drew near, I began to realize that I would not achieve that goal at my present place of employment. I knew of a project that Henry M. Halff had been working on for several years. He and I had briefly discussed the project about three years ago and I had a great interest in it, as the project would encourage high school students to learn science. Henry’s project fit well with another goal of mine. For many years, I have felt that if we don’t generate more interest in math and science in our young people, society will, one day, find itself with a severe shortage of scientists. I called Henry and told him of my interest in managing his project, and he said, “It is interesting that you call at this time, as I have, within the last three weeks, decided that if I am going to finish this project in my lifetime I will need to hire a Project Manager.” At our first meeting, I asked Henry if he believed in “Divine Guidance”. He responded, “If I ever get any, I’ll let you know!” This first meeting was an experience for both Henry and I that eventually led us to form Twist Education, LLC, in late 2008.

I read an article in a magazine the other day that was about making your own luck. This article struck a chord with me as I could relate it to my life over the past few years. It spoke about a woman who had a reversal of fortune, not with regards to money, but in her love life. As it turned out she had been too focused on her career goals to put any time or energy into her personal life. When she reached her ultimate career goal (tenure at a university), she “made plans for the rest of her life”. After making those plans, she was open to someone taking an interest in her, flirting with her, or just being friendly to her. This “new mindset”, if you will, led to her meeting the man she eventually married.

The article went on to say that “lucky” people exhibit certain behaviors that scientists have shown can actually put you in a position to be more fortunate than if you don’t demonstrate these behaviors. As I see it, the most important behaviors that you need to demonstrate are: being comfortable with yourself–knowing yourself, and to have a plan for your life (or at least some short term goals). Other behaviors are important, but I think they come from knowing yourself (being relaxed, observant, friendly, and, open to visiting with anyone about your life).

The other dimension that I would add to being “lucky” is to have Faith. If we are going make plans for our life, they should be bold, personal, and have some level of risk. If we don’t make our plans with these three things in mind we will not achieve our true potential (bold), not grow through the experience (personal), and not encounter the true joy of the experience through faith (risk). The only way I know to be comfortable with risk is to have faith. Faith keeps me grounded as I travel the path of life and gives me a peace that I don’t always understand. When life is hardest, if I walk the path of life with faith, I am at peace.

Henry and I have had many “Divine Guidance” moments since our first meeting and it is clear how our founding this company unites our life’s experiences and leads us, together, down a path that will continue to make us who we are.

We hope that some of you will join us and that all of you will follow us as we make the journey that is Twist Education.