Play Make Learn

First time in a plane! Haven’t been out of Arkansas in years! Meeting a lot of cool people! Oh my!

This past week, Dr. Goadrich, Ian, and I all went up to Maddison WI for the Play Make Learn conference. It was a ton of fun. First of all, it was my first time being on a plane, so I went from 0 to 4 plane rides within a few days. Then it was my first time being out of Arkansas since about 2010, so I really needed it. To top it all off though, my flight got delayed on the way back home, so I didn’t get home till 3:45 in the morning and decided to donate blood that day.

Play Make Learn

We met so many amazing people at Play Make Learn!

We also:

• Learned about specifics of making educational games.
• Learned about a lot of new tools we can use for our games.
• Met the Field day learning team.
• Met a lot of other cool people.
• Were able to relax.
• Got a much needed vacation.
• Got cheese (the most important thing).

In other news, our presentation went well. We had a lot of interaction from the crowd when it came to questions, particularly about Cultivating Competencies. This was extremely exciting! Ian and I freaked out about how well we did with such little time and budget. However, this brings us to the next question; what do we need to work on?

When the school year starts we need to hit it running with Cultivating Competencies. We need to flesh out the two year story and make sure we have a proper ending in mind. Maybe we can take into account the suggestions people gave at Play Make Learn. The goal is that we get it done in time for Explorations to use it and have an engaging conversation.

Acxiom Internship

Here is some general insight of what happened this week:

• Got thrown onto a new project the morning I got back from the conference.
• My boss encouraged me to take a nap since I was running on ~3 hours of sleep.
• I also gave blood on that day at Acxiom.
• The Arkansas Blood Institute hooked me up to the machine, so they took a lot while I was sleep deprived.

Needless to say, the nap later was great, and I fell asleep insanely quick that night. The next day, I was able to process information better, which was good since the other intern, Garrett Collier, and I were actively working on the project. Basically, we need to help review emails and fill out spreadsheets with a lot of info that pertains to email success rates.

D&D @ Acxiom Status

I have not been able to have a setup meeting with the group at Acxiom yet. It has simply been too busy to be able to focus on that. We will probably have to postpone any progress on that until September.

What’s Coming Up?

• Orientation!
• School Starting back up!
• Continue working on a better landing page for this blog.
• Change “Projects” page to be a portfolio.
• Edit all the pages connected to the WIP landing page.

TL;DR

• We went to the Play Make Learn conference
  • We learned a lot
  • We met a lot of people
• My flight got delayed
• I donated blood on 3 hours of sleep
• I took a boss-recommended nap
• I got thrown into a project
• D&D is coming later