If you often find yourself pondering the above, it sounds like you should have come to BETT conference last week and seen what the future of Better education technology is! It’s the place where UK teachers visit to pick up what they hope will be the best software, hardware and technology for teaching the British Curriculum.

Since Thought Den started attending, way back in 2009, there has been a paradigm shift in the how the crowds experience most of the new programs;  screen based clicking has been replaced with touch screens, and learners no longer crowd around one PC game but each have their own tablet device. The advent of surface computing has been another exciting concept at BETT.

This year more companies are picking up on mobile apps, remote learning and preparing equipment for every student to have a smartphone or tablet to learn with.

It’s becoming more about making use of the wealth of available technology. Children are bringing devices in naturally, so rather than telling them to switch it off, let’s engage them with learning using the tech they understand!

Importantly this year as we’ll be looking at some heavy changes in the ICT Curriculum. State Education is realising the importance of teaching learners about the inners of the software they’re creating and the circuits of the computer they’re working on.  Children should be taught that they are masters of the devices, rather than a slaves to them, and that they don’t have to be constrained by the available software but can create whatever they can think of with the wonders of programming.

With such a selection of products I really don’t envy any teachers making decisions for what to spend their budget on. The iPad is a new invention and only two years old, the 3D printer is only really making a breakthrough into affordability and the app store still has nappies on.

Everything is so young. And probably still about to be replaced in the next two years again.

So, what were my best and worst bits of BETT this year?

Cool BETT

NAO, the logic robot that teaches learners to start playing with programming – made by http://aldebaran-robotics.com/

Safe BETT

A certificate in Safe Social Networking – www.digitalme.co.uk/safe

Best BETT

An Award winning suite for learning on multiple devices: tablets, iPads – www.ko-su.co.uk

Technology Master BETT

Understanding the innards of DVD Readers, Routers, Scanners… the lot! – www.labtech.org

I BETT you need to learn some more…

There were more apostrophes missing again this year, even from some BETT signs!

Thank you BETT, we’re looking forward to 2013 already.

The event was attended by the great and good in playful production (Preloaded, Mother, Hide & Seek, 4T2 and AKQA to name a few) and some incredibly experienced commissioners from the BBC, Channel 4, Tate, Wellcome Trust, Stardoll and EMI.

More interestingly, though, were the representatives from all kinds of brands, institutions and enterprises looking to level up and get their game on. Was it surprising BAE Systems were along for the ride? Or a chap from HSBC? Don’t McLaren Automotive have their hands full making cars go fast round corners? And what does gaming have to do with selling seats on Virgin Atlantic? A surprising amount, as it turns out, because like it or not, we’re entering the era of gamification (surely there is a prettier, less cynical word?)

Gamifi-what?

LinkedIn introduced a feature a few years back that had a profound effect on site engagement. Did anyone else feel press-ganged into completing their LinkedIn profile because of that bastard progress bar? Or even worse : “The fastest person to register today did it in 14 seconds. Can you beat it?” I’ll beat it alright!! **smashes keyboard into monitor**

Nicholas Lovell from Gamesbrief remarked that any parent is painfully familiar with gamification techniques – How quickly can you get into your pyjamas? If you eat one mouthful of broccoli you can watch Nickelodeon for four and a half hours. Etc. Play is an obvious motivator and brands are seriously looking at ways of harnessing this. Product placement in consoles for example. Or custom-built viral games like Fire Kills and Swamp Drifter from the Den. But it’s much more than that…

A fine example

The finest example I took from the event was Star Player, by AKQA for Heineken. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of using their Champions League “watch with mother” app, the top level aim was to capture the tension, immediacy and community-spirit of watching live at the stands and put this in the hands of the casual home-viewer. And boy did they nail it. Andy Hood’s illuminative breakdown made it look easy.
His top tips: Understand your subject and your audience down the most granular level, build core functionality, then iterate. Obvious really…
Favourite feature : hit the ‘Goal Now’ button and if a team scores within 30 seconds you get a squillion points.
Interesting point : the system is 100% manual, requiring a team of expert football and gaming fans to mange match events as they unfold, thus creating live gamable data for home-viewers.

A final rundown

Brief round up of other awesome stuff from the event :
Ville Heijari from Rovio (Angry Birds) said it all started with the characters – initial game mechanics were far too complex. So rather than get people addicted, they wanted players to love their characters and rewarded them with a rich, distinctive look and feel.
Jo Twist from Channel 4 Education hasn’t yet worked out what to call immersive content environments that aren’t games. Playful systems of content is pretty catchy, right? Plus she was ‘gamed’ into replying to people on OKCupid after realising she had the ‘Badge of Death’ for never replying…
Robin from PLAStudios recognised that games can’t be ripped like music can and they offer a connection with the artist that fans are looking for.The new LP sleeve for today’s gamers? Play his great annoyingly addictive game for Blink 182 here get182.com
Tom Chatfield was full of insights and it’s worth following his twitterings. He talked about the challenge of hard play (the mastery needed to complete Portal 2) and the delight of easy play (chucking a shiny bird at evil pigs)
Good and bad of gamification : Giff Gaff incentivised their customers with cash-money to provide support to other customers! Klout is rubbish, and easy to cheat, and has loads of annoying alerts and badge-awards you can’t skip.

Conference summary as a poster!

Beautifully designed by our pigeon-loving intern Abi and curated by other folks at Thought Den from the #games4brands Twitter feed, it features the top 10 tweets of the day laid out for your inspiration – download it here

It was great to see the Tate team and hear more about the game they’re launching with Preloaded, all about neuroscience and Alice in Wonderland…read more on that over at Preloaded’s house. Download our lovely poster!

Hi, it’s me, Dan Course, Co-founder and Technical Director here at Thought Den. That’s me on left. Hi! This week I’ve been lucky enough to begin mentoring a group of four College lads from St Brendens in Brislington as a part of the Bristol Young Talent Awards.

Our team’s project is to promote Bristol’s BloodHound Project with an app created with the AppFurnace platform (another Bristol thorough bred).

In making the promotional app, the students will receive training in Project Management from Everything Everywhere (T-mobile & Orange), Presentation skills from BBC and Work Attire from Cribbs Causeway.

The awards seem to have hit a national and local nerve. Businesses have offered cash prizes, coverage and one company have put forward a fully paid apprenticeship for one lucky student. I’ll be keeping you updated with how our group’s going over the next 6 months.

We wheeled up on last Thursday evening and entered into a real gamers electronic wet dream (dangerous, that). The club was kitted out with comfy sofas, a free bar, a DJ and MAHUSSIVE HD screens attached to shiny games consoles, free for anyone to mooch on over and play!

So in we trot, eyes glinting and super ready to be bamboozled by mind-bending challenges mixed with fancy graphics and some of the best games the goliath of Sony could throw at us.

But… while the staff at the event were great ambassadors for gaming, geeing you on with silly chat and mini-competitions, I’m afraid I felt these “unreleased games” would stay better being unreleased for a while.

Playing on the console they were unresponsive, unnatural and failed to make me care about the character. It’s odd; that companies with so much gaming heritage can miss out on a few simple pillars of game design.

While I don’t presume to understand the complexity of design of a PS3 game, it just felt there were a few playful basics missing:

RESPONSIVE CONTROLS

Players don’t want to feel cheated by their character when controls repeatedly don’t react naturally. Play Booty Juggler!

NARRATIVE

Games need to have a reason, we like ones with playful learning. To be honest though. we’ve all played enough First Person Shooters and puzzle games, they now need something better than ‘just shoot baddies’ to keep me playing. Play Artist Rooms!

GAMEPLAY FIRST

..fancy graphics later. Play Fire Kills!

The games we were playing were: FIFA12, GoldenEye, Uncharted 3 and Resistance 3.

So thanks Playstation, but I think I’ll be sticking to lots of other games for the time being.

Views expressed are entirely Dan’s, so there.

24 hours. One theme.  Some people. Their mission: make a game.

That’s about it really. No stifling rules on programming language, group size, games mechanics or the like. The games don’t have to be screen based, and the attendees don’t have to be in the games industry. What results is a rather lovely hodge-podge of talents, working styles, crazy ideas and heavy drinking.

Arriving on Friday evening, after a brief round of “I am X, I do Y and my favourite game is Dragon Ball Z” (not originally a game, but the pun doesn’t work otherwise, pedant) we split off into teams. The two Thought Denners in attendance, Technical Director Dan Course and Studio Manager/misc George Rowe were two facets of ‘Team Disco’, a six headed hydra also including sound designer/father Owen, film maker/Mohawk enthusiast Sy, script writer/games designer/sarcasm aficionado James and illustrator/dinosaur impersonator Nat (who also wrote a blog post about this).

Team Disco in full effect: misc, sound, develop, film, program and draw

Ben Rhinehart of Mutant Labs, who are part-organisers of the Explay festival, then proclaimed the Jam’s theme to be ‘mirror’. While we reflected on this (ho-ho) we were also treated to the first of Jam’s amazing meals, a home cooked Indian feast.

Curry + beer = ideas

Much post curry brain storming ensued, with different coloured pens and post it notes in full effect, and after a couple of hours of solid synapse bashing we had whittled our ideas down to a streamlined game of disco themed British Bulldog with Medusa and vampires which happened in a temporal cycle of light and dark, with a dating element that also used Chat Roulette and AR…

We quickly adjourned to the pub before our idea got anymore out of hand, where we discovered another team were working on EXACTLY the same idea (well, it had Medusa in it). What to do?

Saturday dawned, and we discovered James had been up all night with our idea spelled out in scrabble pieces, a common practice in the game script writing paradigm. Fortunately, it turned out that our original idea was an exact anagram of ‘turn-based game that’s a bit like Frogger with bugs, but they have mirrors and are being attacked by an angry kid with a magnifying glass’. Who knew?

The place was starting to look like a morning at Thought Den

With the final idea down on paper, another amazing meal, and late comer George arriving with a mirror ball, the stage was set for some serious game creation action. James and Dan cracked on with creating the game in Unity (which Dan had never used before), while Nat started drawing some lovingly detailed bugs and Owen attempted to create the loudest laser/klaxon noise he possibly could. Film maker Sy decided to document the whole game creation process and managed to create a great five minute snapshot of the event:

What was the resulting product? Well, I think Nat described it very well in her blog post on the day:

You are a bug trying to reach the discarded sandwich, but a kid with a magnifying glass stands between you and the gingham paradise, trying to fry you to a crisp (with an entertaining fizzling sound, thanks Owen) It’s a tactical multiplayer, each turn a player moves forward a small distance and positions their mirror anywhere in a circular radius around them, once all the players have moved you hit a button and the kid with the magnifying glass randomly spawns and sends out a ray of sunshine-death which can either hit a bug directly or bounce off another bug’s mirror and potentially hit a rival. The first to the sandwich wins.

It’s not exactly ready for release, but what do you expect in one day? We had a lot of fun making it! You can play it here: http://us.thoughtden.co.uk/GamesJam/

Some quote highlights from Team Disco:

“But I supplied the graphics to you beautifully?”
“Yes, but what YOU fail to remember is that I am massively incompetent”

“Guys, you know how our game is like Frogger but with bugs? Would anyone be offended if we call it Bugger?” [Bugger was later contracted to Buggr to make it well currentz]

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Our rival teams created some fantastic little games in their time. Team Mirrornaut created ‘Mirrornaut’, a side scrolling 8-bit platformer programmed in C Sharp. It’s a bit like Canabalt but with a button to swap to a mirror image of the level. The character also looks like he has an awesome afro, though I think that is just the Team Disco influence and it’s actually a helmet. The graphics are really cool, as is Nick Dymond’s soundtrack, and the whole game is very polished.

Team ‘Late’, as they were dubbed in the DropBox race to the finish, decided to show off and create two games in the 24 hours. One was an iOS app for two players created in GameSalad, based on reading mirror images of words, and could quite easily have been submitted to the app store at the end and gone on to international acclaim. Their second game was a 3D affair, where you play Jason (of Argonauts fame) who must fend off the deadly gaze of loads of attacking gorgons; it left us both awe-struck and a little scared of David from Echoic’s “Medusa, give me back my fleece!” sound effects (though I don’t think they remember the story of the myth quite correctly!)

The Bristol Game Jam was a fantastic event, and we met a lot of great people who do and love similar things to ourselves. A massive thank you has to go to Debbie Connor and Tomas Rawlings of Aurochs digital for their hard work in organising the Jam, everybody who attended and contributed, Korash, Ben and Ella from Explay, Debbie’s neighbour for the amazing food and Lethal Bizzle for providing the post jam entertainment (seriously).

Anyway, we were invited to UWE to take part in a Rapid Prototyping 2day workshop (much like our week long version) to help brush up on skills and solve a question plaguing the music industry. “How do we re-erect flacid music industry sales with a ubiquitous sexy product? Something physical to aid the declining CD and LP record sales.”

Not an easy question, but all the groups worked tirelessly to try and fathom a solution. The event was an ace mix of people; artists, engineers, script writers, technologists, students and research scientists.

I was lucky enough to be involved with an orgy of very clever minds from HP R&D, The Pervasive Media studio and UWE.

Our idea was to create a new market and intentionally stimulate interest in an album before it was even completed. Using some expensive Remote Studio Headphones which tune into the band’s recording studio sporadically. Super fans would to listen to new riffs, bouncing jams, banter and sparky live sets. It was called Gold Jack, see our mascot below.

Gold Jack mascot

To visualise that for a pitch, it was in all a proper dirty experience. With 3D printers burning through litres of plaster, post-its being slammed un-ceremonisasly to most surfaces and all interspersed with a lot of heated USP chats!

Post its

The workshop finished with all groups pitching to Seth from PIAS music and showcased some very beautiful ideas, like the “Music Vault”, engineered to capture memories and “dieTunes”, music only released when the artist had popped their clogs.

dieTunes

Thought Den value these training workshops very highly, it keeps the directors on their toes, tickles their digital gray cells and allows blind exploration into new business opportunities for all our clients.

Thanks UWE and Pervasive Media Studio for a very well organised 2 days.

Sex. (just felt like I needed to write the word after that post)

The brief

Run a week long thinking/doing workshop to help the BBC’s brightest new talent design a pervasive experience that welcomes visitors to the BBC’s new base in Salford Quays, Manchester.

Ingredients

Take ‘The Apprentice’ and mix rigorously with ‘Dragon’s Den’. Chuck in a dollop of ‘Tomorrow’s World’ and leave to set. Before baking gently stir in some ‘Big Brother’. Serve with fanfare and flourish.

The process

Take our Industry Day series (intensive practical workshops with 150 students) and combine with our Professional Development workshops. Rejig the program 400 times, develop some unique brainstorming techniques, hone some team-work exercises and squeeze in the all-important ice-break / brain-melt activities. Not to mention a few fantastic presentations from members of the BBC fold – Adrian Woolard, Head of Research & Development. Richard Greenwood, Head of Format Entertainment Development. Robin Kemp, BBC North Events Manager.

The 5  day Manchester trip was fantastic, as much a process of learning for us as it was facilitation for the group. Over 100 ideas were generated to launch the arrival of the BBC in Salford Quays, flagship “oop norf” location, as part of their grand vision to embrace the nation and be less London-centric. 12 trainees were put through the Thought Den mill with invaluable support from the Simons, Bethan and Alice.

The week started in the heart of Manchester where we looked at how to create magic moments for audiences without blinding them with technology. Mid-week was a maelstrom of brain-dumps and idea orgies that left the team shell-shocked to say the least. Come Friday, they were reborn and reinvigorated, pitching two bizarre and captivating ideas designed to inform and entertain visitors to the new Salford site. It was a humbling and inspiring 5 days.

Our unique training courses were first trialled in 2007 for the students of Bournemouth University. Since then we have worked with students and professionals throughout the creative industries, sharing our front-line experience and helping each student define a toolset for conceiving, building and evaluating modern media experiences. Whether for games-design, mobile or interactive installations, we teach timeless techniques to help generate ideas that work. It’s the magic that makes it!

Or is it a “Doh!”? This email has actually come from a chain of events starting at a simple idea, putting it to Paypal, getting it selected, heading to Whitiker House (Paypal UK HQ), being part of Paypal’s entrepreneurs discussion group and all the way to actually receiving some honest sqilla’ for it!

Not bad, eh eh eh and here’s a piccie from the day with the other entrepreneur winners, I’m the goon posing on the side…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54389050@N05/5038261043/

In-fact our  competition entry said, “give us £100 and we’ll buy an Apple Dev licence”. A pretty sensible thought with all the requests for iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and iPad apps our studio is getting.

Low and behold, we won it and now, Thought Den is already working on our first app for the iTunes store!

And here’s the official mail out, (head to Ideas 101)

Official email

So now TD is officially producing apps for the mobile market using our extremely honed skills in games and rich website development. Contact dan@thoughtden.co.uk if you think you business, game or idea will be better placed directly in the hands of your consumers as an app…

…and please don’t send me a good looking spammy email. I will click it.

Thought Den were invited down again to Bournemouth University last week to run a professional studies day to second year Interactive Multimedia, Script Writing and Film Production students. So we packed our buckets, spades and a condensed version of our Thought Den Industry Day workshop and headed to the seaside. With Ben being away in San Fran, Helen (that’s me) developed the session with Dan, adding my unique insight into multi platform production into the Industry Day package.

The Industry Day was part of the students Professional Studies module, the aim of which was an introduction to the processes involved with producing content for the current market. With this vast subject in mind, we chose to include reflections on current market trends, ethics, legal issues, pitching, production roles, career routes and brainstorming methods. Opening with a ‘Pop Quiz’ to assertain the student’s understanding of terms used in current media production (and to make sure everyone was awake), we were able to focus on areas in which they were less knowledgable later on in the day. The day ended with the students developing ideas to pitch for the Bournemouth University student television channel, ‘BUStation‘ using the techniques that we had shared with them.

In addition to our professional commitments, there was also the important task of getting fish and chips to eat down by the sea, however, with autum starting to show signs of arriving, a walk along the beach…on the way to a nice pub (http://www.sixtymillionpostcards.com/) which served fish and chips (with mushy peas, thank you) was chosen instead.

Contact us if you are looking for help with external lecturers for a Professional studies modules or similar. Places with a good reputation for fish, chips and mushy peas will be given priority…

]]> http://www.thoughtden.co.uk/blog/2010/10/thought-den-industry-day/feed/ 0 http://www.thoughtden.co.uk/blog/2010/07/partee-tome-mi-love-its-up-stoke-croft-innum/ http://www.thoughtden.co.uk/blog/2010/07/partee-tome-mi-love-its-up-stoke-croft-innum/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:53:50 +0000 Dan Course http://www.thoughtden.co.uk/blog/?p=659 The dust is settling and the bikes are on the wall. Finally all the boxes are un-packed, the desks have been scraped together and the recycling bins have been swallowing 50 cans to the dozen…

…so it must be time for the moving-in party!

Thursday 29th, 5:30 until late
14 Backfields Lane, Bristol, BS2 8QW

All Thought Den peeps are invited! Email party-invite@thoughtden.co.uk and then after a rigours process of elimination, we’ll put you on the doormens’ list.

Come and drink booze and eat BBQ niceness!

Here’s some piccies from the move so far…