Gamification in education

Gamification in education

26 May 2011

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Gamification has been around in the real world and online for some time. Our every day social networks such as Facebook and Twitter make use of game dynamics (number of friends, followers, likes etc) . Gabe Zichermann gave a great talk on the subject.

However, sometimes I’m not sure introducing game dynamics was or should be intended as a priority, but maybe more by-product of a well designed overall product. I am, I suppose directing this at the average web application. Indeed, there are of course game developers who are highly skilled in building immersive gaming experiences.

I’m not going to go too much into the pros and cons. I just think it has value and hasn’t yet been fully taking advantage of in the education sector. With current wealth of web technologies available, building tools to make learning for kids (and adults) more fun is achievable.

I think codeschool is a great example of what can achieved. If you know of any exciting new learning platforms for kids, feel free to comment.

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By: David Category: Thoughts Tags: ,

Custom WordPress Documentation

23 May 2011

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With WordPress becoming more feature rich with each release, I am noticing the the sites I build tend to vary in functionality. Due to this variation, writing documentation and training users has become difficult. I recently came across the new WP-Help plugin and EasyWPGuide which look like useful tools to help solving this problem.

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By: David Category: Tools Tags:

Getting Started with the Instagram API

14 May 2011

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Just started to play around with with jQuery and the Instagram API. Basically I wanted to search for the a user using their username, get their ID and search for their photos using that ID. The following code seemed to do the trick:

var accessToken = '[your-access-token-here]';
var username;
var getUserID;
var limit = 6;
var setSize = "small";
var size;

var instagram = function() {
     return {
          initiate: function() {
                instagram.getUser();
          },
          getUser: function() {
                username = "[your-username-here]"
                 var getUserURL = 'https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/search?q='+ username +'&access_token='+ accessToken + ''
                //console.log(searchURL);
                $.ajax({
                        type: "GET",
                        dataType: "jsonp",
                        cache: false,
                        url: getUserURL,
                        success: function(data) {
                                         //console.log(data.data[0].id);
                                         getUserID = data.data[0].id;
                                         instagram.loadImages(getUserID);
                        }
                    });
          },
          loadImages: function(userID) {
            var getImagesURL = 'https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/' + userID + '/media/recent/?access_token='+ accessToken +''
                $.ajax({
                        type: "GET",
                        dataType: "jsonp",
                        cache: false,
                        url: getImagesURL,
                        success: function(data) {
                                for (var i = 0; i < limit; i++) {
                                        if (setSize == "small"){
                                                size = data.data[i].images.thumbnail.url;
                                        } else if (setSize == "medium"){
                                                size = data.data[i].images.low_resolution.url ;
                                        } else {
                                                size = data.data[i].images.standard_resolution.url;
                                        }

                                                $(".pics").append("<a target='_blank' href='" + data.data[i].link +"'><img src='" + size +"'></img></a>");
                                        }
                        }
                    });
          }
     }
} ();

$(document).ready(function() {
    instagram.initiate();
});
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By: David Category: Tips Tags:

Ruby On Rails – rake db:schema:load

13 May 2011

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I recently started learning Ruby on Rails via great sites such as railscasts.com. So I started hacking around at some code, learning GIT and before I knew it I had an app running at heroku.com , backed up by beanstalkapp.com. The only thing was my migrations folder was a bit of a mess and rake db:migrate didn’t quite do the trick. I found this post which helped me out, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1780789/heroku-problem-question. Skipped over the migrations and just pushed the schema I needed to get me on the way.

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By: David Category: Tips Tags: