I know I have been quite negligent recently about my blog. Finally, here's an update on what we've been working on!

Around 6pm Pacific time on Sunday, September 4, 2011, we submitted Mini Painters to the App Store.

As Airy Labs is in the earliest stages, it is a historical moment. This game is our first offering in what is going to be a long history of fantastic games with educational and learning value.

This is a firm first step on our path to becoming the largest gaming company in the world and bringing the world the best learning tools that have ever existed.

We want to thank everyone in Airy Labs, especially our engineers and artists, who worked tirelessly day and night to create, iterate, and polish Mini Painters to make it an extremely fun learning game.

Excitingly, we have more great games to come in the next couple of days and weeks.

We would like to think that what we are doing is creating great gifts to the world, and Mini Painters is the first. There are many more to come.

Let's continue to dazzle the world! :)

http://ertmobiletalk1.eventbrite.com/

If you have any questions for me you can put them there too:

http://www.startupsopensourced.com/2011/07/28/19-year-old-stanford-ph-d-dropo...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818816

I was at the first Hack the Future event earlier today at the San Jose Tech Museum. Alex Peake of Primer Labs invited me. I was volunteering and mentoring kids there. I think it is an awesome idea to create a "hackerspace" for kids. Get them started young.

Jon Boorstin's book "The Hollywood Eye" had a great way to describe 3 levels of processing movies - visceral, vicarious, and voyeur

Visceral is how movies affect us at the gut - gore, terror, etc. Vicarious is immersing viewers in the narrative and story, voyeur is higher-level intellectual processing of whether everything makes sense.

Same thing works for games too - think about it

There are a lot of parallels between great trading/stock picking and a proper world view. What springs to mind is the difference, as discussed in the investment classic “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,” between a speculator and an investor. 

Speculators are risk-takers and "buy the trend" whereas true investors pick carefully and are in for the long haul. The financial markets are in so much trouble today because of the very human tendency to look to the short-term and panic whenever things go wrong or stock prices go down. There's strong herd pressure to follow the trend and rush to the current area of excitation.

The book's protagonist, Livingston, is a self-admitted speculator, but his savvy sets him apart and allows him to be a great stock picker. Among these qualities are a more austere, less emotionally-attached mindset for the market. The ticker tape is impartial - it doesn't care how you feel. That's his genius - he could look within himself and understand his mistakes, rather than blame the market. 

This is also a good way of approaching life and of becoming a fountain of innovation. Try to resist the siren of the masses - market psychology - and come up with fundamental insights into how the world works. That's what leads to breakthroughs. Don't be a short-term thinker, and don't "fight the tape" - become more self-aware and a better person. Keep the confidence in your long-term plan and vision, and enjoy the journey along the way.

This is in some ways a follow-up to my earlier post about gamification and the value of intrinsic motivation. One of the chief aspects of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation is that in the intrinsic case, one's experience is "almost spiritual," as the psychologist Edward Deci said. Intrinsically motivated experiences are infused with life, vitality, and intensity. They're what the painter Robert Henri called "more than ordinary moments of existence."

Unfortunately, many aspects of today's society have evolved to be very ends-focused, efficient, and cast under the eye of instrumental rationality, a form of rationality focusing on the most effective way to achieve a certain end, with no understanding of the intrinsic value. As philosopher Charles Taylor said, society has fallen under a malaise of instrumental reason.

There have been many very interesting studies showing that intrinsic motivation in fact creates better learning experiences, more long-lasting understanding of material, and greater creativity. In the educational system, grades are the primary external motivator to get students to learn. It was found that the use of controls (in this case the looming tests) actually decrease motivation and reduce the level of understanding compared to students that were told to learn for its own sake, and to put that knowledge to use by teaching others.

Students who learn material with external controls also forget much more quickly - even though they have superior rote memorization in the short-term, their brains don't retain the information and perform a "core dump."

So telling kids they will be tested on the material is likely to be detrimental for deep learning and real understanding. It pays to consciously create fundamentally engrossing learning experiences rather than just focusing on the bottom line.

In 2010, the National STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) video game challenge was created as part of President Obama's initiatives on STEM education. The $50,000 grand prize was taken by a Flash game called "You Make Me Sick!" created by Dan Norton and Dan White of Filament Games.

I was pretty impressed with the game and though it's short (not that much gameplay), it's much more in line with how educational games should be done. 

In “You Make Me Sick!”, my mission as a disease was to try to infect an elderly man (key characteristics: he’s a mouth-breather with many vaccines). I decided to create an airborne bacterium - airborne because his mouth-breathing would be an easy entry vector for my disease, and bacterium because viruses would have a harder time due to the vaccines my target had.

Mission #1 was to plan my attack. I had my bacteria blow in from the open window, and had to play a little minigame to guide myself into my target's mouth while he was breathing in and out. I succeeded after a few minutes of frenetic clicking and encountered another minigame involving infecting the target's lungs, hopping from alveolus to alveolus.

The game ended afterward (hence my complaint about it being too short), but it was definitely engrossing and was a great way to teach kids how an infection actually happens.

This sort of game, that's fun for its own sake and has real learning value, is what the educational game field should strive for.

Before 1999, Godiva chocolates were seen as the leading gourmet chocolate brand. However, they decided to expand their business and push into Barnes & Noble bookstores, which had the consequence of reducing the perception of their brand as a premium boutique. For the first time, their chocolates contained preservatives and then started facing stiff competition from ultra-premium brands that contained such fanciful ingredients as violets and black sea salt.

To fix this, Godiva started development of a new product with the mission of creating a popular, lustful chocolate experience for young women. They created a blended chocolate drink exclusively available within Godiva stores, marketed as an almost sinfully decadent and seductive beverage. 

The beverage design attempted to leverage many senses - the on-the-spot creation of the drink involved blending Belgian chocolate chunks, fresh raspberries, and cream (mouth watering yet?). Think about it - it involves sight, hearing (the blending), smell, taste, and touch (texture of the drink).

The name given to this product was Chocolixir - it spread to 152 Godiva shops around the world by 2008. It restored Godiva store foot traffic and harnessed all 5 senses of customers to encourage them to indulge. Again, multisensory integration!

A friend asked me recently about whether and how using all the senses leads to better and more effective learning. The field of sensory integration is really interesting. There's a perceptual phenomenon called the McGurk effect, which is often used by scientists as an example showing that perceiving speech from others involves multiple senses. 

It's very simple - you watch a video of somebody pronouncing a phoneme, like /ga/. The audio, though, is /ba/. The brains of most people can't properly reconcile the shape of the lips and the audio, so they hear something in between - usually /da/. This happens even if you know about it! 

The effect is really strong even if you know all about it. To experience it for yourself, check out this video featuring Professor Lawrence Rosenblum from UC Riverside: 

That's the sensory integration happening in your brain. 

On the learning side, there's convincing evidence showing that multisensory environments give rise to much better learning than do unisensory environments. Studies done by cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer have shown that compared to a group that gets information through only hearing, a group that gets information through both sight and hearing have over 50% improved problem solving ability, as well as better recall even 20 years later. 

There's plenty of other evidence, and all of us should be thinking about learning environments and classrooms that go beyond just sight and hearing - what about pairing distinctive smells with lessons and using them to facilitate recall (e.g. associate the smell of lemons with math class)? Or allowing students to experience a wide variety of novel textures when learning subjects that lend themselves to that?