background preloader

Tim Brown urges designers to think big

Tim Brown urges designers to think big

3 Ways To Design Toys That Boost Kids' Creativity Quick, find a cardboard box, a magic marker, scissors, one roll of tape, and three everyday objects on your desk. Your task: Build an intergalactically awesome spaceship using just these parts. You have five minutes to complete this mission before this webpage 404s. 3-2-1 … go! (Seriously, you should do this--it’s fun.) Now that your ship’s out of the hangar and ready for liftoff, let’s look back on the design decisions you made along the way. Fun as it may have been, the past five minutes have actually been quite educational (surprise!). These divergent thinking skills, practiced and honed through years of imaginative play in childhood, lie at the heart of our creative abilities as adults. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that the current approach isn’t working. The answer, quite simply, is to take back creative play by reimagining it for the modern era. 1. 2. Building a creative learning tool doesn’t require you to bottle a teacher inside your software. 3.

Dr. Temple Grandin If algebra had been a required course for college graduation in 1967, there would be no Temple Grandin. At least, no Temple Grandin as the world knows her today: professor, inventor, best-selling author and rock star in the seemingly divergent fields of animal science and autism education. "I probably would have been a handyman, fixing toilets at some apartment building somewhere," said Grandin, 66. The abstract concepts in algebra present a common stumbling block for many with an autism spectrum disorder, which affects an estimated 1 in 88 American children according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fortunately, the academic trend in the late 1960s was finite math, a course Grandin passed with the help of tutors and devoted study, satisfying her college math requirement. "I was lucky. The problem with labels. "One of the problems today is for a kid to get any special services in school, they have to have a label. Lacking life skills. Autism facts. About Temple Grandin Dr.

Boards >> Visual vivisection An animation depicting virus cells from InViVo Communications' broadcast library. Similarly, the release of the iPhone is opening doors to 3D games that use medical animation as a resource for patient care and as a sales and simulation tool. Toronto-based InViVo Communications recently released three games on the iPhone in response to demand for interactive medical programs that pharmaceutical sales reps can engage doctors with at medical conferences. “We’ve started taking our 3D models and building them into interactive programs that have an element of competition in them,” says InViVo managing director Andrea Bielecki. “The games are all medically accurate, so doctors are actually learning how drugs work by playing an interactive mechanism of action as opposed to just viewing an animation. Human Atlas iPhone app “The major benefit is that if a physician said, ‘You’ve been diagnosed with cancer. “As my mother was getting older, she would say, ‘What is an angiogram?’ www.gsw-w.com

Managing industrial knowledge ... The Cathedral and the Bazaar Copyright © 2000 Eric S. Raymond Copyright Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0. $Date: 2002/08/02 09:02:14 $ Abstract I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux.

Related: