Six months ago Thomas Suarez, a 6th grader from Los Angeles, spoke at a TEDS event about the making and sale of an “app”  he created on his own – “Bustin Jieber” (a whack-a-mole type anti-Justin-Bieber game.)  (There’s nearly 2 million views of the video on YouTube so you may have seen it.) Anyway, he’s quite eloquent and now owns his own company. While he’s clearly much further ahead than the majority of 6th graders I know, his actions offer a glimpse of our future workforce.

Suarez, who is self taught, started to build, create and sell his own apps and even created a club for fellow students where he shares what he knows about programming.  He thinks “students are a valuable new technology resource to teachers, and should be empowered to offer assistance in developing the technology curriculum and also assist in delivering the lessons.”

Amen. He’s taught himself Python, Java, and C “just to get the basics down” according to his bio.This DIY mentality is why online learning from CodeAcademy and Kahn Academy, are so popular.

Here’s his talk:

I had a glimpse of that kind of thing in my house two weeks ago. My son is a gamer. His current game of choice is Call of Duty (COD). He plays LIVE with various friends. He decided he wanted to record the game play so he Googled it (“How to…”) and ended up finding something called  Dazzle (about $50 US), a video capture device.

He asked ‘guilted’ me into buying it for him as repayment for the iPod Touch I accidentally dropped, cracking the screen. (He said since a lot of people have small cracks in their screen, he’d rather I not pay to get it fixed but instead buy this Dazzle thingy. This is extortion mixed with love and guilt.) So off we went to BestBuy  and, as it turned out, Radio Shack after that for the right connectors which we couldn’t find at BestBuy. (Dazzle is not created for the purpose of recording XBox play…it just does but you need to add some cords.) Oh, and we went to Wendy’s too. Why not make a day of it?

Back from the road trip….so my son often helps his friends out when they are first learning to play (they help each other) so he thought he’d record a tutorial. I’m not making this up.

Using Dazzle’s software, he couldn’t figure out why the audio control was grayed out (I suspect it had something to do with the default setting on the computer) and since I didn’t want to stop watching the Stanley Cup playoffs to mess with this audio glitch, I told him to look at Audacity (open source audio recording).

Unassisted (except for the Audacity tip), he recorded the audio, saved it as a file type he could import (because I later asked and learned Audacity saves with a AUP file type...so he figured that out) , narrated his video recording, set up his own YouTube channel and uploaded it. All in the  course of an evening…basically unassisted. He’s 13! Amazing since a few folks in the industry (no one reading this of course : ) still say “http what?”

So…later that night, I was watching some lame Stanley Cup Western division playoff game that was boring so I looked up his channel on the iPad and watched what he did. Did I tell you he is in middle school! Yes, these kids are our future workforce. Neither Suarez nor my son would have learned this in school. There’s no app class. There’s no live online collaboration and video recording class (and least in our school district in NY State).

Do you have a similar story?

(As an aside…I know there are people who would not let a 13 year old play a game rated “M” -whether live or not – but my personal approach is one of involvement  – Why is the game “M”? Is he mature enough? Do I know who he is playing with? Do I monitor that? Have guidelines and expectations been set along with what will happen if those are disregarded? Am I prepared to recognize the signs that the game is having a negative effect? Is he getting enough physical activity to stay healthy?, etc. The research is mixed on video games, especially violent games.)

I’m not that up on artificial intelligence but wanted to share this study in Science involving perfect play of a game – in this case checkers. It took 18 years to solve. Wonder when they’ll have enough power to solve Monopoly. Or getting that next promotion. It’s all a game isn’t it?

Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-games expert at the University of Alberta in Canada, solved it. He believes the techniques he has developed could be applied to many real-world problems. He gives the example of scheduling the time and work required to build a complex machine such as the space shuttle.

With these techniques, you could optimise the use of your resources to build the shuttle for the least time or cost,” he says.”

Think about it.

Via NewScientistTech

How creative are you? A test via the Creativity at Work Blog. I’m 49% vs. 51% – a whole brain thinker! Go me.

I remember the old Nokia bag phone coming out back in the 80s to replace permanently installed car phones. Here’s another new cell phone technology from Nokia. It’s the Mobile Augmented Reality Application (MARA) where reality overlays computer-generated graphics onto the real world. So imagine providing learning experiences where an employee walks into a manufacturing facility and graphics & audio synch with what they see – they become a part of it. Or the possiblities for training pilots, doctors, and military personnel. Think about it for student education – be a part of natural history museum by becoming part of it. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly no expert in this area but I’ve always seen this type of technology as a head-mounted thingy so by using something that most people have – a cell phone – it seems much more feasible. Isn’t it awesome? There’s probably much more going on in the gaming world. From Technology Goal blog.

Update: Via Ellyssa Kroski at iLibrarian a link to 7 Things You Should Know About Augmented Reality from EDUCAUSE. Go figure. It’s the Law of Attraction working.

Photographer: Ryan Jorgensen

You can’t really get through a video game without learning something. It’s interesting to think about how someone learns from a video game that is not sold as ‘educational’ – unintentional learning. Oops didn’t mean to learn something…

I have a Playstation 2. A video game on fishing teaches  to select different bait in real life. FIFA and NHL ’07 teach the rules of the game.

Here I am playing PONG with my Mom in the mid-70s. PONG brought computerized video games to household console TVs. Everyone in our neighborhood came to check out our new game. My Mom must’ve got in line at Sears…

But at work it’s a different story. Gaming is still foreign in many corporate environments. Its potential is mostly unrealized. Even playing a non-electronic game like Jeopardy was a ‘behind closed doors’ event. Don’t open the training room door some might hear us having a good time! But it works. When it’s in context and done right it’s better than just about anything else.

Massively Multiplayer Virtual Worlds (MMVM) like Second Life introduce us to new ways to bring incorporate games into learning. An article in the Washington Business Journal several weeks ago (in the “Trends” section) is promising.

For those of you that have not experienced the thrill of PONG I’ve provided a link to an instructional video (below) for the Windows version. It’s an absolute scream!

(The video is also an effective illustration of how you can present really simple instructional content with humor).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-YNmnBjAM