Marymount Social Genius
This is a project I’ve been thinking about since September and I finally had time to hack together a prototype.
I want to build a tool to help teachers learn student’s names faster. This may seem like a minor problem to solve, but in fact, it is really important. It’s much easier to conduct a classroom when you know all the students names. I have over 200 students. It’s March. I’m still struggling to learn all their names.
Luckily I know someone who already built a tool for this. A few years back, Rob Faludi used Processing to build Social Genius, a game for learning our classmates names at NYU ITP. http://www.faludi.com/socialgenius/
I reached out to Rob to see if he’d mind if I hack his code to make a version for Marymount students and teachers. He told me that my friend Matt Parker had taken over the project. So I reached out to Matt!
I met Matt at Eyebeam to check out his incredible 3D volumetric display, Lumarca and convince him to help me make Marymount Social Genius.
Matt had translated the game into a web app and was happy to help. He sent me his code for this: http://madparker.com/nyupractice2011/ He made it for a games conference. It was written in HTML5 and java. Works great on all pc and mobile browsers. Wonderful.
It took me about 30 minutes last night to hack a prototype for Marymount using the 4th grade class. I can’t share it because it uses images of students. But trust me, it works great.
Today, I’m going to share it with Jane Bell, the head of the middle school. If she gives me the OK, I’ll make password protected versions for each grade and share them with teachers for next year.
Now I just have to convince Matt to let me share the code with other schools…