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Virtual and Augmented Reality for Businesses

I’ll admit it. I was a bit of a skeptic when it came to practical corporate uses for Virtual or Augmented Reality. As a marketer I’ve seen countless projects with significant potential fall flat because the focus of using cutting-edge technology isn’t on the purpose behind the project, but the technology itself. Even tech giants…

September 7, 2016 // Kat Shanahan

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

How to Align Standards and Educational Games

Games are great tools to engage and inspire students, but in today’s standards-based educational system that’s not enough by itself. Educational games need to not only engage students, but also meet the needs of educators who are using them as instructional tools. To help educators feel confident that games are introducing, reinforcing, or evaluating classroom…

August 29, 2016 // Kat Shanahan

Building Creative Practices: Strategies for Communication

Welcome back to Building Creative Practices! In my last semi-regular installment, I discussed strategies for creating Psychological Safety in the workplace, which at a high level is simply a way to get your team to operate in such a way that no one on the team is scared to speak their minds. I talked about effective…

August 22, 2016 // Brandon Pittser

SBIR Funding: Dreadfully Wonderful

So, you have a brilliant product idea and you think Uncle Sam should fund it. I can’t blame you. Compared to VC money, SBIR funding comes with relatively few strings attached. Most importantly: you don’t have to give up any equity. So what’s the catch? I’m glad you asked! One, the funding rate is low (typically…

August 17, 2016 // Dan White

How to Design A Student Game Design Competition

Our community of educators continually tells us that students are eager to learn about game design and coding. One way to provide students with game design experience outside of the classroom is to host a game design competition. The competition doesn’t have to be large in order for students to get an in-depth look at…

June 30, 2016 // Jennifer Javornik

Let’s Play! Transforming My Teaching to Match My Students

Miranda Salguero is a Dual Language Immersion Teacher at Sandburg Elementary, a 4k-5 elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin. The article below is a chapter from our eBook How to Teach with Games, featuring stories and resources from educators who are using games in the classroom. Miranda played an instrumental role in the creation of the eBook…

June 20, 2016 // Filament Teacher Fellow

The Game Artist’s Arsenal

What is one of the most obvious, but least-talked about aspects of digital games? It’s literally staring you in the face, and yet is not necessarily required to make a functional game. If you answered “game art,” you should continue reading. Hi, I’m Natasha, and I’m the art team lead. At Filament Games we are…

June 2, 2016 // Natasha Soglin

Building Creative Practices: Psychological Safety

This is the first piece in an ongoing series about developing skillsets that position you for success in a creative enterprise. Central to my approach is the idea that I’ll explore one concept per article. I’ve gained my perspective directing small marketing teams, wherein skinny resource margins mean that incremental growth is more achievable than…

May 25, 2016 // Brandon Pittser

Extending the Life of Your Flash-Based Video Game

While there have been several waves of education video game development throughout the past 40 years, most of the games that have been developed in the first half of the last decade were built in Adobe Flash (now Adobe Animate). In fact, some say that the accessibility and capabilities of Flash made this most recent…

May 19, 2016 // Jennifer Javornik

Machine Learning

Most articles introducing machine learning on the web start out with charts and equations showing how to fit a line to a linearly separable point cloud. That’s neat. But that does nothing to show the power of machine learning models to change the way that we write software and conduct business. There will be plenty…

May 9, 2016 // Alex Stone

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