The new job starts Monday. The main programming language there is Java. I haven't done much with Java in years. In my remaining free time, I took a few whiles to catch up on how the language has chan...
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FAQs, Facts, Drowning in Questions
You're a small team of software developers. You make a service|API|tool|thingy used by many, many software developers. They have questions, so many questions. You're drowning in questions. How can yo...
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Book Report: Shady Characters
Thursday afternoon, talk at work turned to punctuation. Since work uses a lot of @s and #s, this should not surprise you. Someone hazily remembered that Shakespeare had invented “modern quotati...
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Notes on "Presentation and conversation with Nonchalance" Adventure Design Group Meetup
I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to keep secret some things I learned at Nonchalance's presentation at the Adventure Design Group hosted by the lovely Go Game people. But I'm not sure exactly what; not a...
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The Noun Project sponsored an iconathon to create and compile a collection of little drawings to represent educational topics. Many icons were designed, two of which caught my eye. Games for Learni...
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Link: Puzzle Pile interview about Lumber Party
In which we find out that The Octothorpean Order is partly about puzzles but also partly about instructional design, human cognition, and the limited power of written instruction to inspire action. T...
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Link: Can you code better than a fourth grader?
What if we're talking about a Vietnamese fourth grader? Neil Fraser went to Vietnam, and since he's a programming/educating nerd, he checked out the local computer science programs. He didn't just ch...
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Newbie Game RFP
There's this sketch of an online puzzlehunt that's aimed at puzzlehunt newbies—it doesn't expect teams to be able to recognize, e.g., semaphore flags. This game would stick around—if, yea...
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Playtest went well. Wow, I figured folks would conk out after an hour or two, but they just kept going and going. Not everything got tested with n00bs; some folks showed up who'd played in puzzlehunt...
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Book Report: How to Sharpen Pencils
I'm a technical writer. I write instructions. I often team up with a "Subject Matter Expert," someone who's really good at doing something. I ask them what they do and they write it down. You might w...
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Message to Puzzlehunter Wanna-Bes
Someone smart asked for some draft email text they could to a San Francisco-area puzzlehunter wanna-be. So I wrote this: Playing in puzzlehunts is fun, but can be kinda like diving into the deep en...
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Wanted: Wanna-Be Puzzlehunters near SF
You've had this conversation. They ask you what you did last weekend. You say you puzzlehunted. They say OMG that sounds amazing, I wanna play. You encourage them to look at some MIT Mystery Hunt puz...
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Jotting Notes on Fundamentals of IRL Game Design
It's a seminar by @jettstein. (You think I'm typoing "GC summit talk by Bob Schaffer" really badly, but no: instead of watching a GC Summit video today, I did something else.) I attended Fundamentals...
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Book Report: A New Culture of Learning
It's a book about learning; it's a book about culture. Our culture has brought forth all of these fancy new communications technologies. If there are some facts I need to know, I can probably look t...
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This week's snoutcast had an interesting tidbit "future events: bikes? Seattle? stay tuned!" And also some thoughts on puzzle-based learning if you're an educator. They're interviewing a math teache...
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Book Report: Too Big to Know
We know a lot, and nowadays we know that we know a lot. I read a lot of books. But I read only a teeny-tiny fraction of the books that get published. And books are, in turn, just a teeny-tiny fractio...
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Book Report: Puzzle-Based Learning
I recently reported on the first couple of Winston Breen books. And then Joe Fendel asked me if I'd read the Gollywhomper Games book. Apparently, puzzle-based young adult fiction is a thing? Back in ...
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Book Report: The Art of Game Design
The Art of Game Design is pretty awesome. This book is about design. In theory, it's about game design. But if you're designing something for humans, this book contains plenty of wisdom. I think thi...
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Book Report: Apprenticeship Patterns
For some reason, I thought this would be a book of mentoring patterns, but that's not what's going on here. This is a book for a computer programmer who wants to learn more about the craft. If you'r...
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Musicians about the Internets
Yesterday, I went to a party at which I knew almost nobody. (Well, I knew some folks, but they mostly showed up at about the time I had to leave.) What's an introvert to when faced with a crowd like...
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Book Report: Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development
This book is about software development process. I guess it's aimed at project leads, project managers, and managers. But it's organized into Design Patterns, a form loved by many computer programm...
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Book Report: Sane Asylum
This book is about Delancey Street, mostly about the way it operated as of 1974-ish, based on a visit by an East Bay reporter. I grew up with a big Delancey Street building in my neighborhood, but fr...
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Book Report: Strengths Finder 2.0
Strengths Finder 2.0 is an online personality test disguised as a book. The test administrators charge you to take their test. To make the idea of spending $25 to take a personality test palatable,...
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Not-Really-Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, even Denmark
At work, I work with training/educator folks. Tonight, I posted a message about stuff I'd read this evening. But it's not confidential or anything so I guess I'll post it here, too: LARPers run a...
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Book Report: Influencer
Good grief, it's another pop psychology book. I've been reading a lot of these recently, it seems. I swear, if I have to sit through another discussion of children who can/cannot delay their consump...
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Book Report: The Air We Breathe
This was a fun novel. As with other Andrea Barrett novels, the heroes are scientists, so I'm inclined to be sympathetic. This novel is narrated in the first person plural, by a community of people....
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Book Report: Principles of Instructional Design
This is the third book on instructional design I tackled reading. It's also the wordiest. "When one begins to think about the application of learning principles to instruction, there is no better g...
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Book Report: Designing Effective Instruction
Notes about another Instructional Design book. Please pardon the dry nature of this book report. Again, emphasis on measuring learning. Consider making up the final exam questions before you write...
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Book Report: Developing Technical Training
Please pardon this book report: these are my notes from the book, not the usual wry and insightful commentary. "Instructional design", as near as I can tell, is a movement to apply some rigor to les...
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