At work, I work in a training group. I was just listening to one of my fellow trainers talk about an outfit that makes some service for education/train-ish folks. It's called Moving Knowledge. It's useful if you've set up some training material for self-paced training.
The system sends the students a message that the educator composes, a message containing an assignment like "Go read the chapter about Thermodynamics. Respond to this message with the word that fills in the blank: The second law of thermodynamics tells us that _____ always increases". It has a few ways it can send messages.
Students reply with answers. If the student gives the right answer, the system congratulates them. Otherwise the system prompts the student to, you know, get it right.
The system sends out more assignments to students as they progress.
And it all sounded to me like, you know, an automatic answer-handling system from a Game or scvngr's software or the control system for some kinds of pervasive games. But repackaged as an educational tool. Neat trick. (Of course, that's probably not how it went. Probably both the educational-messenger and the game-messenger applications are specializations of some general-messenger application. But anyhow. (Or maybe not, as I hunt further around their site, I see mention of them running an alternate reality game.))
Wow, if only the people at work wanted to learn Morse Code instead of parallel computation algorithms, I could probably apply a lot of this puzzle-huntish stuff to my career...
Labels: business, puzzle scene