Unity3D 2.5 for Windows released so now I can share my games as works in progress.
I am up to level 5 and welcome any and all feedback.  The download may be large so you
may wait a while for it to load the first time. There are some bugs so reload if it acts strange.

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In case anybody is interested. I am sharing my thoughts for each of the 26 levels in the Alphabet Puzzle online.  People can edit the database freely.  I will track changes to avoid inappropriate behavior.  Here it is.

A while ago we were searching web tools and mashup capabilities. By simply linking a delicious.com account with 6pli.com under the worldlearningtree id with bookmarks to educational websites we created the following prototype here with no coding required.

Recently, we found a great tool by the name of GameBucket by the Institute of Play.  The advantage is they built this tool on their own and populated it with much larger content.

Compare them on your own and let us know what you think about them.

Geogebra is powerful free mathematics visualization software I have used for a while but realized I never posted an article on it.  I used a 3D capable version but it has a few bugs so only search for it and use it if absolutely necessary.

Here is a demonstration of it’s usefulness.

Here is a photosynth of some rooms in my house.  I have also linked it to live search maps so it can be found this way as well.

Recently we submitted our suggestions on how to revolutionalize online education to Google’s “Project10ToThe100” contest.  For a Strategy class we framed the idea into a one page description which we include here.

“Schoogle”

Summary: 

“Schoogle” is a free entertaining online education website which can track a user’s progress and the community can add educational content.

Strategy:

Use the resources and technical competencies of Google to expand from an information provider to an education provider. “Schoogle the world”

Idea:

Google can use the concept of providing an online education system (“Schoogle”) to bring together many of its products and technologies in support of a common goal. This will solidify the Google brand and expand their market.

1.  Efficiency - A less expensive way to build an online education system is to spend resources on providing a powerful framework and toolset which allows for users to create and add educational content to it.  This would be similar in concept to a “Wikipedia” of which Google has created “Knol” but advancing the system to support the interactive training modules.  User ratings could be added to help select which content is best to use.
2. Retention - For added “Stickiness”, tracking the status of a user’s educational history (with testing methods built in) would provide incentive to continue to use “Schoogle”. Users could be rewarded as they progress and see their overall history.  This could be similar to leveling up characters in online role playing games. (Level 6 Math Wizard)  Google tracks vast amounts of user information and has key technologies to scale and distribute processing and storage.
3. Value - To increase value of the education, social networking should be built into the site (Google has worked on “Lively”, a 3D chat interface).  People can be motivated to provide assistance to others as they play the educational games with each other.
4. Unlimited - Concepts such as “mashups” should be used to provide simple style game play with a large number of game variations (see PhotoSoup as an example of a dynamic limitless word search game).  Reference Google’s “Searchmash”(Google discontinued this) to see just one example of how they have used mashups to enhance search results.
5. Seed - Google also has acquired video game companies and can use them to provide a minimal set of valuable base content (the seed).  If they could target K-12 education they can hook a set of customers (children) with the goal of expanding the content prior to when these users need more.  This will help to secure the “Schoogle” and therefore “Google” brand as kids develop.  (The goal would be to create another verb.  Google is to search as Schoogle is to learn.

Additional References (Use these as search terms in Google):

Worldlearningtree, Unity3D, Red Interactive Agency, Kongregate, Colr Pickr, Phun, Dimenxion, Thinkmap,  App Engine, Gears.

Brittanica share is a bold new step to offer bits of their content for free.Bloggers can get full and free access (for 1 year so far) and link to full articles that others will be able to see in their entirety when linked to.Here is an example using “China” as the reference.China

Someday soon, Mapping the real world back into it’s 3D representation will happen based on this emerging technology.

My vision is to support MMO RPG style games that provide educational benefit. They should be able to instantly play on any system with very little loading time and in any browser. Here comes the Unity Engine to solve this problem.

Find me at http://twitter.com/harleyw

6pli has created a visualization of bookmarks from del.icio.us. We sent them an email asking which tools were used to create it and if they could add our del.icio.us id. Our users can use the excellent tool to find an organized view of entertaining free educational online applications. See our del.icio.us bookmarks here at http://del.icio.us/worldlearningtree

We have discussed before how to keep costs minimal by using web 2.0 utilities that offer free services if you publish your work. We have decided to start using Dabbledb and here is an example of how we can imbed spreadsheet information which is of a similar format to our web links for learning.

The first thing one must do when researching is figure out how to most efficiently create, store and visualize their research. In this quest we immediately found free mind mapping software called Freemind and started putting it to use.

This was an excellent tool for tree structures but it does not allow for data that has multiple parents. For data that is structured more like the data in the world wide web where any object can have links to any others one needs to present the data similar to how they have done at the VisualThesaurus.

You may think that it looks interesting but it’s full potential can only be seen in 3D (or rather 2D over time) . For this we use another Web 2.0 company called Screencast-O-Matic to display the view in a movie type format.

Here is the resulting screencast. Most Web 2.0 companies list the html code that allows you to imbed the object in your site. By simply pasting this code you can see the application within your own web page. Here is the screencast. If you click where it says, “Play” then it will play the screencast. If you click on the image, it will open a new page and play the screencast.

Let us take a moment to illustrate our point about the power of Web 2.0. This site allows the usage of the application if you share the content online. Now think about the WorldLearningTree’s vision to provide online education for free and to be open and share what they do online. This means that costs can remain very low since tools can be used for free and the data can typically be stored on a remote server.

So what about the technology that the Visual Thesaurus used to create the application? Well, it is created with Thinkmap software. To our surprise, when we contacted the company we talked with the CEO Michael Freedman directly and got a 60 day trail version. It costs $5,000 for a license but it is so powerful that it may just become the first significant purchase on behalf of this company. The spider version of the software was used and there are three other interesting visualizations that can also be utilized. We were pondering why technology like this or mindmaps weren’t being used more to represent web sites. This brings us to another key point. If you haven’t found what you are looking for than the odds are pretty good that you just haven’t looked hard enough. We recently came across the WikiMindmap website that converts wikipedia entries into a mindmap format. We sent off an email just today to try and determine what else they plan for the future. Their response indicated they are expanding the usage of the technology and they would be happy to assist us in utilizing the potential technology if we can act together in an efficient way that does not impose on too much of their time.