Category Archives: Public

Centre for Life, Newcastle, Public, Public engagement, Uncategorized, Workshop

Centre for Life, Round 2: Workshops

11 September, 2015 nastero Leave a comment

In August we were back at Centre for life again. This time with something different: workshops. With the Game On 2.0 exhibition, it was a perfect time for ASTEROID to run game design workshops. Since it was a very busy summer, I only started preparing the workshops the week before. Luckily Will, Maeve and Nikki were there to help me. So after a few brain storming sessions we came up with a rough structure of our workshops.

The details filled in while running the workshop in the museum, not one was the same. Gareth, our artist from Fluid Pixel, and I ran 3 workshops a day, all around lunch time. So, finishing my lunch before the next workshop started was my daily challenge. We brought an explorers box with us to the Centre for Life with objects related to games and 3D vision, including a living mantis (that was a hit :). From these objects, children had to guess the topic of the workshop. Soon, they came up with their own 3D games. I was glad to see my hints were clear enough. At this point it was time to get out the tablets and show them ASTEROID. As you can imagine, they were all very keen on playing it! Every time I asked for the tablets back, I would get a few disappointed looks. After the game playing, Gareth showed them some of the early sketches he made for ASTEROID, so children could see how the game evolved from ideas to drawings to game animations. From there on the workshop could take different routes. The overall idea was to give children the chance to come up with their own ideas for a game, with the current version of ASTEROID as a guide. Sometimes we even travelled through space to discover new planets for ASTEROID.

In other workshops, children designed an egg planet or a chicken planet. Also, we brainstormed about missions in a football world. Now and then the topic turned a slight different route with fighting, Vikings and deadly monsters. Fairies were also a rather popular theme. The children designed fairy houses, fairy clothes and developed stories for our Fairy Forest level. A few workshops were football themed and we discussed different missions that a game player could complete on such a planet. Some of the ideas we came up with were finding footballs, collecting shirts (I saw some beautiful designs for that), gathering the players, looking for fans and, of course, a game should end with penalties.

We had lots of fun drawing. Some of the children were real artists, how beautiful they could draw. Others came up with the most original, and sometimes crazy, ideas (a “chicken cloud”, why not!). Towards the end of the workshop, Gareth would turn some of the children’s drawings into game animation sketches. The next step in game development: programming – this was of course not very feasible in a half an hour workshop, but the children went home with an insight on game design. And looking at their faces, they have had a great time with us 🙂

Centre for Life, Meet the Scientist, Newcastle, Public

‘Game On’ at Centre for Life, July

11 August, 2015 nastero Leave a comment

Last week Will, Maeve and I showed our research at the Centre for Life’s “Game On 2.0” exhibition. Two tests were being run, firstly, comparing the ASTEROID test to current tests: Frisby, Randot and TNO. Secondly, measuring the average person’s depth perception on psychophysics equipment Ignacio had set up. To run all the equipment we had quickly learnt beforehand how to use the stereotests, record data and power up Ignacio’s experiment.

As the Centre currently has the “Game On 2.0” exhibition on, we were bang in the middle of 60 years’ worth of games, all emitting different sounds. Although exciting at first, these snippets of Mario Cart and Clash of the Titans began to grate on us by the end of the week! We were constantly on our feet testing the many children that circled to the table to get their eyes tested. All the children seemed to enjoy ASTEROID and the parents were willing for us to take down data for both experiments. We received lots of feedback, got a large sample of data and are excited to see what the stats will show! Altogether a lovely week interacting with the public 🙂

Nikki

We went to the Centre for Life and had a stand in the Game On exhibition so that we could get children to participate in our research. We managed to get lots of children of a range of ages to take part, which was great and really helpful. We had two separate tests going on; a test of ASTEROID compared to other, currently used stereotests; and a psychophysics test to get an idea of the average population’s stereovision.

Sometimes it was really quiet and you could just hear the sound of computer game characters dying and shooting one another on the many screens in the exhibition, and at other times we were rushing around to cope with the numbers of people crowding around our stand. We found that as soon as you had one person doing the experiment, other people were curious and wanted a go too, so we tried the tests ourselves in the quieter moments. I’d never done any of them before, only being new to the project, so I quickly realised why the children were finding some of the tests difficult, by struggling at them myself. The children found the tests a range of difficulties- due to not understanding our instructions or by being nearly stereoblind. I was only there for two days but in that time we gathered lots of data and I found out more about the project.

Maeve

Centre for Life, Meet the Scientist, Newcastle, Public, Public engagement, Workshop

Meet the Scientist at Centre for Life (17-18/1/2015 and 24-25/1/2015)

3 February, 2015 nastero Leave a comment

Last weekend, we had our first public ASTEROID event in the Centre for Life. Together with Will Herbert, a project student from our lab, I organized a “Meet the Scientist” event and we let the children have some fun 3D experiences. Will collected data for his experiment with a big 3D television. The children were quite enthusiastic about taking part in a real science experiment and even competed against each other to detect the 3D shapes! For ASTEROID, I brought pictures of different game themes and asked children to pick their favourite one. I had tried to be creative myself and had drawn little boys and girls that the children could colour in and pin to the picture they liked the best. I also brought star stickers for the kids to stick onto their favourite pictures, these were also very popular J. About 50 children voted and we will now continue working with the top 3 themes. It was great to see how intrigued and curious children can be. The older children enjoyed the visual illusions and were astonished by the effect of a 3D Einstein face illusion. Parents remembered their own childhood when playing with the old 3D ViewMaster. The enthusiasm and spontaneity of the children and parents was infectious and I had a great time!

Author: Kathleen Vancleef

Newcastle, Public, Seven Stories, Uncategorized

Big ideas event at Seven Stories

22 January, 2015 nastero Leave a comment

So we now have another event in our diary: on March 31^st, we will present ASTEROID at the Big Ideas event at Seven Stories in the Ouseburn Valley! Using children’s books we will explain 3D vision to 10-12 year olds. I’ll be participating in several workshops organised by Seven Stories to explore how we could use children’s books for ASTEROID. So, I’ll be on a quest to find the perfect book for our project. What’s really exciting is that there are some artists involved too! They will be at the workshops inspiring us to make use of drama, film or cartoons in our activities. I’m curious what will come out of these workshops. It will be great to explore new creative ways of communicating science!

Author: Kathleen Vancleef

The blog for the fun 3D eye test