After taking a week off...

I have to admit that this week I have not gotten as much development done as I would have liked, but there are also some upsides of taking a break. Removing yourself from the ultra-focused environment of developing an application can give you a new perspective on your progress and can lead to better ideas about what direction to move in for the future. Its easy to lose sight of your real goals and a little perspective can go a long way. For my part, a little time away from my project has led me to focus more on the trade off between a realistic simulation meant to educate or inspire, and a game designed to entertain. As is now stands, my project is somewhere in between, trying neither to mimic reality or fully entertain the user. I think the end result could be much better if start working mainly on features meant to be fun, as trying to remold my project into a realistic simulation of space at this point would inevitably result in disaster when it could not be completed on time. Even though I didn’t really develop my game this week, what I learned while not working on it may well be more beneficial to its quality.

TED Talk Ideas

The concept of a TED talk is essentially to communicate ideas that can be highly technical to an audience that is not necessarily familiar with the lexicon of the field in question. As a result I think that the TED talk format that is usually roughly followed will work well for a simulation as it is basically a programming project, and is therefore very technical. Direct screenshots or videos from the simulation would obviously be useful in contributing to the audience's understanding, but I would ideally like to also generate some kind of visual data of my progress. For instance, a very rapid video of all the coding I have done could demonstrate how the program has changed over time and how I have had to rewrite past pieces of code in order to better facilitate new ideas or different implementations of old ideas. Realia would be a challenge for a project that is entirely digital, although I do like the idea of giving the audience something that they can actually touch to help break up a presentation and stop it from becoming monotonous. I would like my presentation to have some similar aspects to that of Ken Robinson, although in practice I think that visuals would be an easy way to show the audience what I have actually made, so I don't think I'm going to be going the zero technology route. Something that I do think I can implement is strong communication of ideas without reading off of a PowerPoint, and I will try to use technology sparsely rather than whenever possible.