Benjamin Dickman’s “Problem solving strategies in Boggle like games” discusses how games like Boggle can  be approached using George Polya’s four principals of problem solving. The 4 are: Understand the problem, Make a plan, carry out the plan and then reflect. 

I thought that these games might have had the potential to help improve a persons critical thinking and decision making as it encourages the player to make fast decisions and quickly use given information to their advantage. 

Dickman said that there are three beliefs that most people believe. 1: searching for Boggle words has little to do with real problem thinking, 2: most words are found early on and lastly that only geniuses are able to be good at these games.

I found that in the article “How a hobby can shape cognition: visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players “ Hargreaves, I.S., Pexman, P.M., Zdrazilova, L. et al. Mem Cogn (2012), they found evidence that support the first belief that those games have little to do with problem solving. They found that was more about the amount of exposure to vertical reading and skill formed around these games and memorising anagrams. But they also realised that it does improve your recognition system and although further research will be needed, it could be possible to get our recognition systems to adapt and become better at extracting information in different scenarios. 

References:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-011-0137-5

So over the past couple days Mark and discussed a lot and nearly disbanded the idea but now we have decided to continue. Both Mark and I felt like it just didn’t have enough potential or we just began losing interest in it and almost felt like we reached the end of the tracks. I think my biggest worries were that it just lacked depth and I kept thinking about the why and what was the focus/ idea around it.

We talked to Ben about our process and our thoughts. A couple of key points i noted was that firstly, some of the words or sentences were very ambiguous and it wasn’t clear how a sentence was defined if it made sense or not. Then secondly, how could we incorporate multiplayer and lastly Ben suggested that instead of moving everything down, why not just take the bottom line out, empty and put it up at the top. 

The two of us decided that one person would have to moderate and decide if the sentence makes sense and also would be the timer. This could help incorporate some form of multiplayer as they take turns. 

Description

Play was our next project. Our brief was to make a collection of artifacts and implement play/playfulness into it. I choose to be in a team for this project as I wasn’t very confident at all. Our collection was homemade weapons or simply saying making a bunch of weapons from household items. Theory and the concept behind it is generally to show anyone from teenagers to adults can do this sort of thing as it's convenient, affordable and can easily protect themselves and it’s also playful. We as a group of three made only a few artifacts as we were having some problems beforehand. But the truth is it that we all loved each aspect of doing this project from beginning to end.  

Feelings

This project felt discouraged and extremely difficult at times. Before coming out with the idea of homemade weapons we had several other ideas which were all turned down by our peer mentors. The process of searching for specific household items to make into weapons was stressful, but the processing of making them, I felt went smoothly, maybe because there wasn’t any restriction so we could of design any weapons we want.

Evaluation

What went well for us was the process of making our weapons from everyday object. I really like the fact of exploring as I get to create many unique weapons that not only is fun but also has an unknown outcome which makes it even more exciting. Things that didn’t go well was finding household items I think that we spend too much time worrying which items were the best to collect which made it even more frustrating as it could be very simple.

Analysis

In this project we didn’t really have enough time to finish it completely even with 3 people we only made 10 homemade weapons which wasn’t really enough. The reason for this was we spent too much time focusing on one aspect of the project when we really shouldn’t. I guess if we had asked the peer mentors for help earlier things would of worked out better and we could also come up with a final artifact.

One of the main requirements we had to have in our project was to have a playful approach I believe we nailed it from making our homemade weapon to testing it out everything aspect was fun. It went well because it gave us every opportunity to think with our hands rather than our mind.

Conclusion

Things I should have done differently next time are to stop worrying about little things and focus more on the big picture. Overall, I am happy with what we had created as our group did spend a lot of time and effort in all our collection we did not regret a single thing.

Action Plan

Focus expanding ideas and go in deeper

Worry less work more

Think of more and better collection next time

Last week, I volunteered my time to go to Job Fest for the company I work for. It was Wednesday morning, the morning before we had to give our presentations on our Play projects.

My task was, to talk to the 100's of young people looking for jobs, explaining why my company was a great place to work, what we did, how we did it, and how they can apply for jobs, while answering any questions they had.

At first I was nervous, I'm not usually that great of a talker to people I don't know. But after the first few people, I really started to think differently, I wasn't nervous, all my talk was just flowing naturally and it was great.

So we finished the last studio project, the play one. in the beginning of year Clint said something about the grades. put your effort into your work and it will show and i believe that i didnt do that. I didnt commit enough effort and time to this project.

and it shows.

the quality, the amount of frequent post is no where near the level i want it to be and the level it is expected of me. even the quality of my final prject is not what i want it to be.

so this is a hard reset. i will do things similarly to my works earlier in the year/semester.

We were given the task of forming a collection through a playful approach, with importance placed on the process rather than the end result.

For me the word “play” means many things but I find the most playfulness in the process of making/doing. So I approached this task by going out and collecting old technology that interested me and focussed on finding a playful way to display my collection which allowed me to explore many different processes. I experimented with many ways of making and displaying my collection, trying to draw on the juxtaposition of old vs new. I thought of a display piece utilizing my collection and my laptop for old/new, though in the end I decided that there wasn’t enough playfulness. After approaching it photographically I found myself excited to try new ideas.

The end result of my experimentation is a process that uses digital and physical medium. Using photographs of my arranged collection I removed/moved and added code to the image file in Note Pad to create artefacts in the image. I then used Photoshop to add effects such as colour changes, followed by printing the image onto tracing paper and again with baking paper. I trialled covering the paper in cooking oil and found it increased the transparency and allowed me to layer the pieces with quite an interesting effect. After drying the images where then framed. I derived my physical processes from film techniques to pull from old and new.

The thought process behind my collection and why I chose to arrange it the way I did was to get people thinking about creative technologies as more than just the latest products or ideas. I wanted people to realise that creative technologies have always been here but are only just beginning to be defined as such, as well as when new technologies considered old.