2BCF: Week 2

We continued to work on our Scratch & Makey Makey games to demo to Mike Salyh, a game designer on the corporate side of Two Bit Circus, who funnily enough is from my roommate’s high school (repping Sandwich, Mass - yes it’s a real place! And yes, they have Sandwich Police).

He gave us feedback on how to design alternative controllers. For example:

• Controllers that don’t look like controllers excite guests

• Controllers that have good translation from what it looks like to what it should do, to what it actually does is very satisfying

• If you have a wacky controller, there should be more mercy in the gameplay

• If a controller is frustrating to use, you should create more space to vent out frustration in the game

We each demoed two of our experiences to Mike. Of course, I demoed my Chicken Infanticide game and my Fishing for Phishing Scams game.

His comments on my Chicken Infanticide game:

• Nice experience

• Weird to use your face

• Maybe think about turning it into a rhythm game?

• Usability/visibility is a problem - need to make it easier to use

• Change to be STEAM themed 

• Ramp up eggs over time

• Creates great selfie moments

• Shareable + wacky - unique to pace

His comments on my Phishing game:

• Need to make more clear feedback when scame is got/not got - create a clear feedback loop

• Gameplay is solid

• Theme can do a lot of tutorialization

• Not clear if you’re supposed to get phishing scams out?

  • Do I want to get phished?

For the water controller:

• More discrete things with water because you want that to be the focus

• Not good for controlling specific things

• Could be an interesting controller for an escape room? - manipulating water on a board

Overall, it was really helpful to hear his feedback on designing our experiences.

This week, we also started getting ready for camp. 2BCF was contracted out by Hawthorne School District to provide programming for 12 days (3 weeks, M-Th) at a free summer camp for at-risk youth. We worked on developing our own curriculums to teach at camp and prepping our supplies at the warehouse.

This involved taking what we learned from Scratch & Makey Makey and converting it to a curriculum that is both teacher and student facing. As I mentioned in the previous blog, 2BCF focuses on professional development as well as engaging youth. The work that we create needs to be able to handoff to a facilitator to teach in the future.

2BCF: Week 1

Day 1, I arrived at the Two Bit Circus Foundation Warehouse in Gardena, with absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. First of all, driving on the 405 was an experience within itself. Having grown up driving in Boston, I was sure I could navigate the LA traffic, but I was wrong. Think aggressive Masshole drivers combined with Pittsburgh Left-ers who never signal when they’re about to merge, but also with less honking so that you have no idea where people are on the road. But I did get there in one piece!

I got the low-down on the organization and a history lesson of the growth of 2BCF. Having written about them in my senior thesis in college, I was familiar with their history up until 2015. 2BCF is an interesting model, as one of the few organizations that started as a non-profit and has since then grown a for-profit arm (of which, most people in the industry are more familiar with). 2BCF still retains the original initiative to inspire the next generation of innovators, while the Microamusement Park focuses more on building experiential entertainment. However, their goals are not mutually exclusive of one another. The experiences that the Microamusement Park creates can be used to inspire programs run by the Foundation.

Having gone to Eyeo (a creative technology festival in Minneapolis), I was a week late to the game. I joined a group of interns from USC who were working on rapid prototyping games. Justin (our supervisor and the Director of Innovation at 2BCF) challenged us with each building 5-10 games with Scratch and Makey Makey in one week.

Scratch is a free block-based visual programming language available online for students to learn the basics of programming. While Makey Makey is electronic board that allows everyday objects to be converted into alternative controllers. Both were created out of the MIT Media Lab. Funnily enough, I had actually just attended a talk at Eyeo by Amon Millner, one of the people who worked on developing Scratch.

We were challenged with taking games that already existed on Scratch and “bastardizing” them into STEAM-themed games (his words not mine). Think Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. We were told not to worry about graphics, but just to focus on gameplay and building interesting alternative controllers with the recyclable materials in the warehouse. This was the first time that I was tasked with fully producing a game on my own. I had no programming experience before I arrived. I was a bit overwhelmed. But I figured, if kids could do this, I could probably do it too?

Like any project, I started off with research, aka playing a TON of games on Scratch. It was pretty impressive what kids were able to make with the program. I really wish that I had something like this to play with growing up. I think the closest I ever got to coding was messing with the HTML & CSS of my Neopets storefront.

I also started to think about what I wanted to create this summer, inspired by what I had seen at Eyeo and the 2BCF brand. At one point my list of brainstorming ideas looked like this:

Which then involved into this specific list for Scratch & Makey Makey games:

I started off with what I know best: button smashing and chickens. First semester during BVW, I had worked on a game called Chicken Run. Originally, we had wanted to use Makey Makey to create a controller that involved the guest wearing a beak that they would then have to peck with to pick up objects. That dream had died when we realized that the mechanic didn’t make much sense in the context of our game. Typically, objects in racing games are automatically picked up when you run over the object.

So I decided to bring that idea back to life. I took the code from a really cute game of a bird pecking to pollinate flowers (not scientifically accurate btw), and turned it into a Chicken Infanticide game. The guest wears a beak and must smash their face into the table to smash eggs. The more eggs they smash, the higher their score. To complete the experience, heavy metal music plays aggressively in the background.

Playtesting showed that people enjoyed watching other people play the experience more than playing it themselves. The beak was uncomfortable to wear and also the angle of the screen to the controller itself was awkward. It was difficult to both look to see where eggs appeared and then smash it concurrently. The game also had absolutely no STEAM learning (though I had considered skinning it to be a blue jay smashing other bird’s eggs - that is scientifically accurate… kind of). But overall, I would consider it a success for the first game I’ve ever built on my own! My goal was to make people laugh and I definitely succeeded in that.

From there I continued to work on some other ideas:

I reskinned a Dance Dance Revolution game into a DNA DNA Evolution game. I replaced the arrows with nucleotide bases, and the guest had to press the corresponding base pair (adenine to guanine, thymine to cytosine). I had wanted to add a RNA mode, where uracil appears and has to be paired with adenine, but I ran out of time. This game turned out to be incredibly challenging, as players often wanted to just press A to A, G to G, etc.

I reskinned a rocket game where the player has to avoid obstacles, into a reactive elements game. The player is an H2O molecule avoiding reactive elements. The size of the obstacles corresponds to the size of the elements as they go down the periodic table. This game ended up being more successful in terms of gameplay, but I had trouble programming the explosions to correspond with the actual reactivity with H2O. I had also wanted to create a controller involving actual water, but turns out water and electronics is not a great combo. In addition, water as a medium for conductivity is inconsistent because water droplets form and create unwanted connections.

I also had an idea to take some old books that I found and convert them into controllers. How cool would it be if you could cast spells with a real book? But in the time that we were given, I couldn’t find develop a game to match the controller.

I love puns. So I created a Fishing for Phishing Scams game, where two players have to fish out the phishing scams that appear using these baby fishing rods that I created last minute before a demo with a professional game designer from the corporate side. I used tinfoil, cardboard, conductive tape, and a La Croix can that I cut open last minute to serve as a vessel for water. The player must pull their physical rod out of the water to yank their digital rod back up in the game. My favorite part of building this game was by far putting in an image of Rick Astley rolling by quickly across the screen and telling guests that they just got Rick Rolled. Capturing Rick = maximum points.

Aside from building games this week, we also stayed late on Tuesday night to play Two Bit games at the park. While waiting for the park to open, we were asked to help attach this giant sticker to the side of a game cabinet. How many people does it take to put on a giant sticker? A lot. And then more to spectate. And then myself to tell bad jokes the entire time.

We met Scott Barrett, who designed Heavy Burger and talked to him about his design process and how he learned how to build game cabinets. Apparently, this was only his second one. His advice: YouTube it. I did ask him when Light Burger was coming out. I got one scoff, which I consider to be making a great impression!

Concurrently this week, I worked with my brilliant co-intern Jacob Surovsky to put together a proposal for the Children’s Museum at Kern County. We were tasked with coming up with five standalone interactive learning stations for an energy exhibit targeting children ages 8-12. 

Having just worked with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, I was tasked as lead on this proposal. I was pleasantly surprised by how much my previous experience lent me with insights on designing museum experiences. Specifically, how important game mechanics are to scaffolding learning and how mechanics should correlate with learning goals.

We only had a week to develop this proposal, while working on our own games, so it was a little tricky to balance needs. But together we came up with three different concepts:

• Sustainable City: Power a miniature model of Kern County using wind, petroleum, solar, hydropower, and natural gas.

• Energy & You: See how much energy daily objects in your life consume. Generate energy to power your life using the five power stations.

• Energy Midway: Welcome to the Energy Midway! Step right on up and try your hand at any of our energy games! How much energy can YOU win?

We also developed ideas for each interactive learning station that can be re-skinned to any of the above three concepts.

Also, this week I attended a professional development workshop run by 2BCF. Justin taught teachers in the Santa Monica school district how to best utilize their newly provided STEAM Lab and resources. Teacher had 20 minutes to build their own STEAM-themed game using recyclable materials. This Checks & Balances game was by far my favorite.

In my opinion, one of the most notable aspects of 2BCF is their focus on professional development. Many similar organizations have a strong focus on educating youth and providing resources, which is admirable, but doesn’t consider how important teachers are to the equation. Without teachers to support students in using those resources and continued engagement, these can easily become one-off experiences. Teachers are arguably the most valuable resource to students.

My most memorable learning experiences are not from what I learned or how I did it, but from who taught it. I will always remember Mr. Snow from AP Biology teaching us how the cardiovascular system works through a rap song (please watch to make your day.)

Eyeo? More like Wow-O

I first heard about Eyeo through a recommendation by Chris Cerrito, New Media Exhibit Developer at the Exploratorium. He said that this conference was by far one of the best that he’s ever attended for creative technologies.

After a mind-blowing past week, I have to concur with him. The talks, the people that I met, and the incredible work being done in the field were so *simulate brain & heart exploding*. In comparison to attending SXSW in the spring, this was a much more intimate and wholesome experience. Nobody was trying to sell me anything or sign me up for a newsletter I would never read. People were vulnerable with their work and supportive of each other’s experiences. In addition, this conference focused a lot more on social justice issues and inclusivity in design. All attendees were provided with a pronoun sticker to add to their badge, which I thought was such a simple, but impactful idea.

I applied and was accepted as a student volunteer for the festival, which allowed me to attend without having to pay for the badge (yay broke grad student life!). Although, I had to work the festival, I was still able to attend most talks that I wanted to see. Actually, working the festival was a great ice breaker for conversations. Nothing like being recognized as the girl who’s been sprinting the mic up and down the stairs for Q&As.

On Day 1, I signed up to volunteer at the Code+Libraries Summit, an unconference about the intersection of coding and libraries. I chose to volunteer here because I knew nothing about coding or libraries. They both skirted my personal interests: STEAM education and museums, so why not find out what’s on the periphery?

In the morning, attendees proposed their own talks and then created their own schedule. Examples of talks included:

• “My Mayor Wants Me to Help Make the City “Wakanda” - What Could This Look Like?”


• “Technology’s Role in Creating Anti-Colonial Learning Environments”


• “Libraries as “Entertainment” Spaces - How Do We “Make Fun?”


• “The Role of Information Design & New Technology in Forming Library Experience (e.g. AR, data viz, interactive installations)”


In the second talk listed above, we had some intense conversations. I had no idea what I had walked into (I thought I was actually attending a different talk). We discussed whether oppressors could provide the tools for the oppressed to free themselves. People from the City Innovation Team in Austin argued vehemently that we were pushing STEM propaganda onto young diverse students, that the education system was just preparing those students to work at the bottom of the STEM-based jobs. They were strongly against the use of technology to liberate and argued for grassroots methods and community organization. Per their words, they wanted to “burn [technology] all down.”

As someone who is passionate about reaching diverse audiences, I had never heard this view before. It was completely valid and I had never considered it. I was fascinated as to me why people who were so against technology were attending a technology conference. So during the first networking event, I approached the team and asked them. They talked about the rapid gentrification occurring in Austin and the implementation of STEM education programs to “solve the problem.” They didn’t like what was happening, but they couldn’t control it. Instead, they chose to know more about what was happening so that they could be knowledgeable and mitigate the damage.

Lucianne Walkowicz, an Astronomer at the Adler Planetarium gave the keynote speech, and I’m pretty sure that I fell in love. She discussed how access to education is not equitable, and how we have a threshold problem. People won’t get up to the threshold even if it’s good content, because they don’t think it’s for them. She asked: “On any given day, you can have an unplanned encounter with art or literature out in the world, whether it’s through public sculpture, or a quote carved above a building doorway. But what about science?” She discussed her experiments at the intersection of art, science, and experience.

Her keynote made me think of “The Art of Relevance” by Nina Simon, where she asked how do you create more doors to content instead of creating new rooms? How do we create more encounters with science in people’s everyday lives? (Also, shoutout to Story Collider! Hear my Story Collider talk here.)

I attended a talk by Catherine D’Ignazio, a scholar, artist, and software developer who focuses on data literacy, feminist technology, and civic engagement. Having personal trouble finding a place to breastfeed while working at MIT, and struggling with the painful process, she started a hackathon to make the breast pump not suck. I found out that there is better technology to pump cows, than there are to pump humans (which is messed up!). She discussed how missing data sets have created systemized oppression, and lauded the use of data to challenge power. She asked “how do we use our power and privilege to design for collaboration?

Over the course of the week I was able to attend many talks from Mike Tucker’s (Magic Leap) talk on “New Doors of Perception: Explorations Into Mixed Reality” to Meow Wolf’s talk on building “Your Own Multiverse.” Mike Tucker shared their company’s new technology and work. Pushing for the consideration of sound as augmented reality as well as visuals. Meow Wolf talked about their painful growth as an arts collective into an entertainment and arts group.

Nicole Aptekar’s stunning work.

Nicole Aptekar’s talk “A Line Taut Against a Curved World” was one of my favorites. She shared her growth as an artist, and was incredibly vulnerable in her talk. She talked about how she struggled for years, not thinking that she was an artist, even as she created art. She shared how after producing one of her best pieces, she grappled with feeling like she could never produce anything as good again.

 This is something that I’ve personally struggled with. As a kid, I loved making art, but as I got older, I got more hesitant in creating. Putting my pen to paper, meant that I was committing to the judgement of others. In that was the fear that I would finally be told what I thought was true, which is that I wasn’t good enough. I tend to gravitate towards doing things that I’m good at, not necessarily what might make me happy. As an adult, I’m trying to break this bad habit, forcing myself to do things that I might not be good at, but to do them unapologetically.

 Refik Anadol’s talk on “The Space in the Mind of a Machine,” was also incredible. He shared his work which can be found at http://refikanadol.com/. His work was stunningly beautiful, using machine learning and projection mapping to create artistic representations of data that were incredibly moving.

While all the talks were incredible, one of my favorite parts of the conference was by far the attendees! It was a humbling experience to be surrounded by all of these amazing people in the creative technology field. I met Chad Smith, who works on developing VR experiences for the Space Telescope Science Institute (we had mutual acquaintances at NOVA!). Danced around with Matt Brown and his singing sock puppets (see evidence in the video below). Got to play mini golf with Daniel Schiffman from The Coding Train. And learned all about algoraves, live coding rave concerts.

I felt extremely lucky to have the opportunity to meet these people and learn about what they were doing. Everyone was so nice and willing to share their pieces of advice. The conference was well set-up with many networking opportunities to make conversations organic and free-flowing. Nothing like a riveting game of mini-golf to equalize hierarchies.

I would highly recommend anyone interested in the intersection of art, technology, design, and social justice to attend this conference. While it is smaller, the networking opportunities alone are worth the attendance. You can network while making origami, playing board games, or skee ball. And besides just the talks, Show & Tells and Meet-Ups throughout the conference provide plenty more opportunities to learn about other people’s work. 10/10 would go again.

The best way I can describe it is by something that another attendee said to me. On the first night, I met an attendee that was at her 6th Eyeo conference. I asked her what brought her back every year. She told me that the first time that she came, she felt like she had found her people. That’s exactly how I felt at eyeo, that these were my people.

I'm Joining the Circus

After one grueling year of graduate school, I’ve decided to drop out and join the circus.

Just kidding. I’m not dropping out, BUT I am “joining the circus.” I’m excited to announce that I’ve been awarded the Creative Good Fund, a scholarship for ETC students to work with a non-profit organization of their choice for the summer.

I’ve chosen to work with the Two Bit Circus Foundation in Los Angeles. 2BCF is “a nonprofit educational organization designed to cultivate the next generation of inventors, advance environmental stewardship, and spur community engagement.”

2BCF and I go way back to my senior year of college. For my senior thesis, I designed a sustainable after-school STEAM program that inspires interests in the sciences by encouraging creativity, communication, and collaboration. I was fascinated by the idea of using art to bring people into STEM. I loved art, science, and education, and sought a way to combine all of my passions together.

In my early research, I came across this Ted talk by Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, the co-founders of Two Bit Circus. I was hooked. This was everything that I believed in (but articulated much better), and exactly the type of work that I wanted to do.

Fast forward four years later, I’m walking into their new headquarters in Downtown LA at their very first micro-amusement park while on a company visit with my program. One conversation lead to another, and now I will be in LA for the summer, reimagining carnival games with new technology for their upcoming STEAM Carnivals. Full circle, huh?

I really can’t thank the Creative Good Fund, the ETC, and the 2BCF enough for providing me with this amazing opportunity. I can’t wait to see what I will create this summer. Hoping to make 2015 Daryl proud.

View my proposal here