The PopTech Blog

What would be the social impact of an educational computer that only cost $10?

Last October, I introduced the PopTech community to an organization that is trying to answer that question. Playpower.org is an open-source community that is helping to make educational games available for “radically affordable” computers—including a $10 computer that is already widely available in many developing countries. The 5 minute PopTech talk helps describe the educational potential of open-source learning games—and explains the improbable story of how a computer can be sold for only $10!

Just this past December, I traveled to Hyderabad, India to conduct a two week educational game design workshop for top university students in India.

Image courtesy of Playpower.org.

Using IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit and Playpower’s unique game design curriculum, the students learned to design new educational games to support the needs of low income families in India. In order to make the games engaging and relevant to the target audience, the students created games based on familiar Hindu stories, including the adventures of Hanuman—a deity with immense powers who takes the form of a monkey.

Image courtesy of Playpower.org.

Kishan Patel, an engineering student at DAIICT (The Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Infomation and Communication Technology) followed up on the workshop by founding a working group at his own university. There, he leads a team of students who are working on completing the games. They are also helping to conduct formal field studies, in order to assess whether the games are fun and effective for the groups we are targeting.

Image courtesy of Playpower.org.

To learn more, check out playpower.org.

Also, more specific descriptions of the games and source code are available here.

The games prototyped at the workshop:

Hanuman: Quiz Adventure – Quiz game shows are popular in India and this quiz game challenges the intellectual power of the whole family to help a young Hanuman fly all the way to the sun.

Hanuman: Typing Warrior – Typing is a skill that can help expand economic opportunities. In this game, players use their typing skills to help progress Hanuman through a series of challenges in order to help win a war against the evil Lord Ravena.

Mosquito SWAT Team – Malaria is one of the greatest public health threats in India. In this game, important information about preventing malaria is embedded in an addictive set of mini-games that invariably involve killing lots and lots of mosquitoes.

While on the plane ride down yesterday to the SXSW Festival in Austin, I was flipping through the February issue of Fast Company and came across an article that put a huge smile on my face. It was a visual representation of what the future of design would be for hospitals—hospital 2.0 you could call it.

The hospital has been more or less a place where they get one thing done: get people better and get them home. But this article made me think about hospitals in a new light – part of a collaborative effort to improve communities as a whole.

In thinking about Public Health 2.0 and next level ways of thinking in the field, I feel it’s important to look at cross-disciplinary collaboration in order to meet the increasing needs of the public’s health and well-being. This includes bringing in the design/UXand green aspects of community building.

Of note: hospitals consume twice as much energy as typical office buildings – they are also making it happen all day, every day! Needless to say, hospitals are huge targets for examining efficiency, and the U.S. Green Building Council is developing LEED for Healthcare. With everything from aesthetics (roof garden, cafeteria) and electronic data (medical records) to user design (waiting room, the views) and energy efficiency (on site power, solar power harnessing), the future is looking brighter for staff and patients alike.

As these ideas go from prototype/concept to reality, I hope this new road of inter-disciplinary inclusion will serve as a catalyst in other areas of health.

Shouts to Golden Section Graphics for the illustration. Read more...

For the past few weeks, along with you, PopTech staff has been reading Connected, the book PopTech 2009 speaker James Fowler co-authored with Nicholas Christakis (find the book on Better World Books or through an independent bookseller on Indie Bound).

Tell us: what did you find curious, alarming, or fascinating in Connected?

Please leave your questions for James in the comments, and let us know some of the parts you found especially interesting.

Four things I found particularly relevant:

- Some of the research in the book is becoming known as the “your-friends’-friends-can-make-you-fat” effect; this indirect influence is called hyperdyadic spread.

- We have heard, thought, and considered exhaustively the success of Barack Obama’s political campaign; the twist in chapter six of Connected:

Obama’s campaign was a historical milestone in all kinds of ways, but the most revolutionary way may not have been its fund-raising. Many have commented on Obama’s remarkable ability to connect with voters, but even more impressive was his ability to connect voters to each other.

- In chapter nine we learn that social networks are self-annealing. “They can close up around their gaps, in the same way that the edges of a wound come together.”

- The final pages return to the underlying overall theme, that networks facilitate contagion as well as altruism, but that’s not to say networks accelerate charity or even, perhaps, microdonations without befriending the group or individual; “We would rather give a gift to a friend who will never repay us than to give a gift to a stranger who will.”

Here is James’s talk at PopTech 2009:

and an update from James in February 2010 about the danger of not thinking of ourselves within networks:

Please leave questions and thoughts in the comments below.

Know a great book we should read together in 2010? Drop us a recommendation: hello [at] poptech [dot] org

Yesterday, artist and computer programmer Zach Lieberman came by the PopTech Brooklyn office—it’s actually right down the hall from his working space—to tell us what projects he’s worked on recently.

Last October, Zach spoke at PopTech about his EyeWriter Initiative, “a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.”

Look for Zach’s PopTech talk next week; for now, more on his recent travels and inspirations:

Zach will be speaking at SxSW this Saturday morning on a panel (details) about openFrameworks, an open-source c++ library “designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation.”

I’ll be at the Interactive part of SxSW this weekend (do @poptech or leave a comment if you’d like to meet up and talk about PopTech) attending panels on the SWSX Greater Good Programming track.

Can you think of other ways to use Zach’s technologies? What are some of your recent inspirations?

During PopTech 2009, I shot an interview with The New York Times scent critic Chandler Burr about his PopTech 2009 “scent dinner,” where he collaborated with Executive Chef Lawrence Klang at Natalie’s Restaurant in Camden, Maine. For each course, Chef Klang created in taste and flavors what Chandler created in scents:

Chandler told me that he has fallen in love with culinary perfumes, a category of scents little known in the U.S., which are either conceptually food – for example, a perfume that smells of salt – or perfumes made with food raw materials – such as peruvian pink peppercorns or crushed sugarcane used in the rum-making process.

This led him to his scent dinners – a delicious and educational experience that actually consists of two parallel dinners – one olfactory, the other edible.

Kudos to Camden-based David Berez at Post Office Editorial for his smart editing, Scott Buffrey for audio sweetening, Daniel Stephens for his artful shooting, and Mo Kirkham for his patience, even when the audio stopped mid-interview.

Oh, and Chandler’s NYT column is “Scent Notes.”