Posts

I was finally convinced to start playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’d been hesitant to give it a try for a few reasons. First, Nintendo games are expensive. Second, I wasn’t sure I’d actually enjoy it. And third, if I did enjoy it, I wasn’t sure I’d want to sink time into it. Having played it for a few hours today and successfully paid off my initial expenses to Tom Nook, I totally get the appeal. No, it will never be thrilling. But it’s a simple “life simulator” that you can enjoy to whatever detail you prefer. For me, I’m not necessarily interested in the things I can get. I’m currently motivated by the Nook Miles achievements. I’ll be a big bug-catcher and fish-fisher. The first thing I did was clear my island of weeds, and I intend to do so tomorrow. I found out quickly that if I just suspend my own judgement and allow myself to appreciate the straightforward charm of the game, it’s a relaxing way to pass the time. ...

I really enjoy the Unmade Podcast with Brady Haran and Tim Hein. They generate some wonderful ideas, and the fact that it’s two old friends hanging out reminds me of the conversations (and podcasts) I have with my own friends. One particular bit that has been ongoing in special episodes is Tommyball. It’s a fictional sport with no clear rules (it’s essentially Calvinball), and in these special episodes it’s Brady interviewing Tim, who plays the role of a conceited former player, and current commentator, of Tommyball. The most recent episode has Tim reading the audiobook of his recently released autobiography. ...

I’ve moved to a new position at work recently, going from a Curriculum Developer to a Curriculum Project Manager. My main role is no longer creating products that will directly go off to students (although I’ll still be doing a bit of that). Instead, my job is to create the processes and structures for my fellow curriculum developers to make sure they have clear goals in a project, and a set of tasks that allows them to effectively get their work done. The entire goal is to remove the planning and scheduling cruft that our team was doing (poorly) on our own, since we could each only give a little bit of time to thinking about it. ...

I mentioned in my previous post about creativity during quarantine that I was working on writing a new game. I’ve been interested in trying to write something that moved away from text adventures and went into open-world RPGs. I’ve been inspired both by the Republic Commandos game run by Mikhail on an episode of OHAC (and in-person during college), as well as the Campaign Podcast he recently got me into. ...

Work has been getting crazier in the past week or two. We are now planning on being online for a while, and the curriculum work that has resulted is growing rapidly. There are many courses to rewrite as we experiment, on the fly, to figure out what tools we want to use (or avoid). I’ve been put in charge of these experiments, and it’s a much larger logistical task than I’ve ever had to deal with. It pales in comparison to what others have done, but it’s quite a doozy on my end. ...

John Conway passed away a few days ago. He was a favorite among mathematical educators and communicators. He was involved in a large array of interesting projects and results during his career, many that can easily fascinate even the most disinterested people when it comes to mathematics. Here are a few things he worked on, listed roughly in the order in which I came across them in my mathematical life. ...

iPadOS 13.4 was released a couple weeks ago, and with it came full support for cursor devices. You can now connect a mouse or trackpad and have a small circular cursor that acts like a mouse for your iPad. Certainly many people won’t find this useful, but it was really the missing piece that allows my iPad to go from a device mainly useful for handwritten notes and media consumption to a full-fledged computing device. I can fairly comfortably navigate 90% of what I do on a daily basis. While I still prefer my regular computers for podcasting, and also prefer the larger screen real-estate, the iPad now allows me to perform my regular work functions. ...

Maybe artists and writers of centuries past had it right, that isolation and odd situations gives a creative surge. Being cooped up at home more than usual has led me to seek out more novelty, and with that has come a desire to create that novelty myself. Over the past weekend I messed around more with Garageband on my iPad, and wrote a small RPG (which I’ll post about once I play it this weekend.) ...

As we’ve been transitioning our in-person learning centers to be fully online, the question has come up about how to use slides and work with students. While Zoom offers screen-sharing and annotation, the annotation on an actual slide persists on the screen: if you scroll to a new slide, the annotation remains. There’s no way to annotate a document using Zoom. Even worse, the “whiteboard” feature in Zoom, though cool in many ways, really loses out by having no way to paste formatted text, or even images, onto it. That takes away significant functionality. ...

My company is using Zoom, as are many universities and public school systems, to teach online. I’m hoping at some point, when the fires are put out, I can provide some of my own suggestions for using Zoom that have come up during my time dealing with the transition. For now, another short post. The biggest thing for us is being able to still run interesting activities that are engaging. Just because this new medium assumes lecture-style classes on the surface, there’s a lot that can still be done with a bit of creativity.