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FROM CONCEPTION TO LAUNCH
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We started with a simple concept consisting on on-boarding the user by letting him/her create his own character and choose his country. From there, the visualization would show a set of data related to the user’s profile, comparing his/her own situation with those of other characters around the world.

During the first phase of the project, we created a storyboard to delineate the scope of the 4 age groups that we wanted to present:

• Primary education.
• Secondary education (lower & upper).
• Tertiary education.
• Adult age.

During the second phase, together with Simon Normandeau – statistician at UNESCO – we analysed the coverage of the data and decided on the selection of the tables that allow the widest exploration available. In some cases, when the data of the country was missing, we felt back on the regional data to keep as many countries as possible in the visualization.

The design and the animations were all created by Thijs Geritz – freelance graphic designer and animator based in The Hague, Netherlands.

To produce the visualization, we decided to use the latest technology available: JavaScript.
In order to provide the best experience on mobile devices, we also designed a touch-friendly interface.
I used createjs as main library to program the visualization, and Thijs used Zoe and Adobe Flash to generate the animations.

Our team was split between the Netherlands and the Canada and we had to deal with 2 time zones and 6 hours of difference. Despite the distance, we managed to keep a great communication flow and we proudly launched the visualization on the 5th of March, few days before the International Women’s day!

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PREVIEW AND LINK
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The visualization is available in 3 languages: French, Spanish and English and you can see it on:
The website of the Institute for Statistics of UNESCO.

To mark International Women’s Day, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics released an interactive tool to highlight the progress and pitfalls in girls’ and women’s education. This tool uses a game approach to engage a general audience of a wide age range concerning gender disparities in enrollment and transition rates from primary to secondary and tertiary education. Users put themselves into the game by creating their own characters and then compare their situation with those of other characters around the world. They can also explore the data further by using a ‘time machine’ to change the settings of their characters (…).

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This post is a reaction to Stacey Mulcahy‘s letter to her niece: http://futurewomanintech.com/

I have crossed path several times with Stacey in tech events, especially at the infamous Flash on the Beach / Reason to be Creative where she gave a couple of talks and with great respect to her, I can barely recognize myself in her depicted feelings regarding our industry.

After reading her post. Surprised. I decided to share my own perception, because, for me, being a woman in the tech / programming / gaming industry has been rather an advantage than a prejudice.

I integrated this field for about 8-9 years now – After working 2-3 years as graphical designer and having a hard time getting a steady employment and income. As I was a young mother, this job insecurity was very uncomfortable and stressful. Since I changed direction and moved to this more techy area, I could enjoy full employment, steady income and career opportunities where people believe in my role within the team. Honestly, It has been a nice ride so far!

I don’t remember having to face macho behaviors or having to prove my competencies more than another because I am woman. On the contrary, people, in general, always welcomed me for bringing something different and lacking in a field mostly leaded by males. For a job application, and equal qualifications, I can recall being chosen because the recruiters enjoyed having a mixed-gender team. And regarding to salaries, if I happened to be paid a bit less than my colleagues, its mostly because I didn’t really care about it and did not put much effort into the negotiation. I cant blame my gender for that.

To make things really obvious, since I moved from France to the Netherlands (in 2005), I worked for several Dutch companies. And let me tell you something, I can barely speak Dutch. So regardless of being non-speaking Dutch and being a woman, I was given job opportunities… and why? because I have technical / programming skills and it was all they needed.

Do you think we can say the same thing in many other working fields? I really doubt it.

Because of this fairness, I could change employers several times to try new experiences and collaborations. Every times it was easy and encouraged by both teams, the one I left and the one I joined. Always keeping good contact with the people I worked with. In only few years, I broadened my network and my expertise much more that I could have hoped, really thanks to the good energy I had around me!

3 years ago, I decided to start my own company and for some reasons, I resigned from my last job. Because of that, I had no unemployment benefit and no financial back-up and it was a little risky-situation. Some friends of mine, already freelance, knew that I was joining their side and helped me getting my first contracts and recommendations. Once again, I was encouraged and helped by my connections in the field. Recognized for my competencies and skills regardless of being a woman.

Today my daughter is 16, and my advice to her is to go for a technical job where her expertise can be easily measured and appreciated. Then the result of her work is what will be seen first and it will be liberating. People will notice what she is capable of doing, her added-value to the team and not her appearance, especially not her gender.

This is the experience I have had for myself. I am really happy I have chosen for this industry.
I really cannot explain why there are so few women joining us. I am passionate about this job, loving its community… and there was no day I regretted this path. I am sure that plenty other women could feel the same as I do.

So yes, I am not denying that women are a minority in this field, but is this really an issue? When I studied Industrial Design in the late 90ies, we were four women graduating compared to a hundred men. I guess women and men just do not appeal for the same things in general… Does it really matter? As long as we have the freedom of choosing what we like the most and being able to work together with respect and equity.

As for the open-data, open-knowledge, supportive and pro-active communities, open-source resources… Our industry has been ahead of its time, modern and democratic.

I am sorry Stacey, for disagreeing with most of your points. You are still are a rocking b**** who codes!
Cheers!

I will share the evening with 4 others speakers who will talk about their experiences and projects on the subject.

• Antoinette Beijen
• Horst Streck
• Ekim Tan
• Hayo Wagenaar

My presentation will open the event and it will unfold as following:

• I will talk shortly about my background and how I came to learn and practice gamification in my daily work.
• Then I will show a few examples and explain what we can do with a “game-thinking” approach.
• Further I will give some advises and tips to gamify your projects with the right tools.
• And to conclude, I will talk a bit about the workshop that I will give with Thijs de Vries in January the 18th.

See you there!!

With the participation of the team of UNESCO led by Amy Otchet and Thijs Geritz, we defined the visual identity of the project and the interaction for the data-visualization.
The project came live on the 21st of November and was published in 3 languages: English, French and Spanish.

The latest edition of the Global Education Digest reveals the urgent need to address the high numbers of children repeating grades and leaving school before completing primary or lower secondary education. New data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) show that about 32.2 million primary pupils were held back a grade in 2010, and 31.2 million dropped out of school and may never return.

Together with Thijs, we delivered the following products.

• 1 Interactive data-visualization showing the global trends, the regional snapshots, and the repetition rate and dropout rates for each country.
• 1 Infographic & 1 flyer
• 6 charts to support the public presentation of the Global Education Digest

Thijs was in charge of the visuals and I took care of the data-viualization and the overall project management.
The data-visualization is developed in Javascript and supports the main browsers including IE8.

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CONTEXT
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The project was commissioned by UMC Erasmus and Stephanie Klein Nagelvoort-Schuit (Internist acute medicine-intensivist) was our main contact to translate the ABCDE procedures to the simulator.
The acronym ABCDE indicates the order of evaluation and resuscitation: Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability and Exposure.

I worked closely with Evert Hoogendoorn (game designer) who conceived the simulator and Brian Heylin (programmer) who co-coded the engine with me. It was an ambitious and challenging project as we were depending on medical knowledge than none of us had before starting the first concepts and the first prototypes.

We created a system able to run different scenarios in which the virtual patients could be highly monitored. The medical personnel who train with the simulator can perform more than one hundred tasks to diagnose their patient and they have 15 minutes to secure his/her state.




In April 2012, the first public release was welcomed with a lot of enthusiasm. 16 computers ran the first 3 scenarios during a full day dedicated to the kick off! Many people could try to get the highest score on the main leaderboard. I left the project at the end of this first phase but the ABCDE-Sim continues to be improved with additional scenarios and features.

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NOMINATION
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Yesterday, Evert announced that the ABCDE-Sim was nominated for the Dutch Game Awards 2012!

And I am really happy about this! I hope the simulator will win and IjsFontein will keep playing an innovative role in many other challenging projects!

Being a motivational tool, it can also be used in a manipulative way and therefore, it must raise some ethical questions!

To understand what we can do with gamification, I would recommend approaching it thoughtfully and from several angles:

• Game Design
• Serious Gaming
• Psychology
• Human resources
• User Interface Design
• Marketing

BOOKS
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Game design
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Jesse Schell – The Art of Game design, The book of Lenses – official website – Probably the best book to read when getting started with Game Design and Gamification!
Raph Koster – Theroy of Fun – official website – Funny and has nice illustrations.
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Augmented Reality Games – Serious Games
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Jane McGonigal – Reality is Broken – official website – Inspirational, but too many “super” and “extraordinary” for me… Evangelists tend to turn me off, but it very personal.
Karl M. Kapp – The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education – You can download a free sample chapter from astd.org.
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Psychology:
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Drive: The Surprise Truth about What Motivates Us – official website – A lot of great examples. Give new insights on how work and education can be more engaging and rewarding.
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Marketing / User Interface Design:
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Gabe Zichermann: Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps

VIDEOS
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Smart Gamification: Designing the Player Journey – Amy Jo KIM
The Pleasure Revolution: Why Games Will Lead the Way – Jesse Schell
Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right – Sebastian Deterding
Gabe Zichermann: How games make kids smarter
Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation
Education Gamification Means No Child Left Behind: Tim Vandenberg
Fun is the Future – Gabe Zichermann
Driving User Behavior with Game Dynamics – Rajat Paharia
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ONLINE COURSE
Coursera Gamification

LINKS
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Experts
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Kevin Werbach – Twitter | website
Sebastian Deterding – Twitter | website
Mario Herger – Twitter | Online Workshop Enterprise Gamification
Gabe Zichermann – Twitter | website
Jane McGonigal – Twitter | website
Amy Jo Kim – Twitter | website
Jesse Schell – Twitter | website

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Others
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Gamification Research
Gamification
Innovation games
Future of game-based learning
Games and Impact
GameStorming

PERSONAL NOTE

For me, the radical changes brought by the rapid improvement of medias during the past 2 decades also transformed deeply our expectations, our abilities and our overall satisfaction. The emergence of Gamification seems to participate to the urge of improving our ways of living, working, educating, interacting with others…
It brings a couple of bricks for building a better framework in order to keep people engaged with their lives, with a sense of progression toward a better future.

WANT MORE?

I am currently working on 4 lectures which summarize the different perspectives explained into the resources above, and I am looking for presenting my work. Contact me if you would like to host one of them

• Introduction to gamification
• Game design principles
• Games and education
• Games for good

I finally got some time to dive into it and with the great speed of Neko, it was a lot of fun to get more insights from this data. I decided to publish my results openly, so anyone can use it for his own purpose. I would be interested to develop a web/mobile app out of those data, do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to commission something like that.

You can access the parsed data with some Google visualization here.
I added a pdf file containing the visualization below in a better quality.

Methodology:

The sightings are grouped by week. Therefor, when you read 1999.1, you are referring to the week number 10 from the year 1999 (the week number 1 would be 1999.01).
To highlight the main events, I kept only the weeks that contain at least 25 reports.

For each of those events, I also saved a text file with the detail from the sightings per shape. I only saved it when the shape was reported at least 4 times.
In order to get more relevance with the shapes being reported I grouped them as following:

• “unknown” = “unknown”, “other”
• “rectangle” = “rectangle”
• “round” = “round”, “sphere”,”disk”, “circle”, “dome”,”oval”, “egg”
• “cone” = “cone”, “pyramid”, “diamond”, “hexagon”
• “light” = “light”, “fireball”, “flash”, “flare”
• “teardrop” = “teardrop”
• “formation” = “formation”
• “triangle” = “delta”, “triangle”, “chevron”, “crescent”
• “cylinder” = “cylinder”,”cigar”
• “cross” = “cross”
• “changing” = “changing”, “changed”

General trends:

States with highlighted events:

[ 1997 - week 11 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 1999 - week 35 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2000 - week 27 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2002 - week 38 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2003 - week 35 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2005 - week 38 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 1998- week 10 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2005- week 17 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 1997 - week 27 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2001 - week 02 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2004 - week 34 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.
[ 2005 - week 39 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 1999 - week 46 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 1997 - week 27 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 1999 - week 46 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 2009 - week 38 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

[ 1997 - week 46 ] Download the reports with at least 4 of the same shape.

In the past 6 weeks, I learned a lot on the JavaScript platform.
After discovering Cocktail, I helped developing a file manager using Haxe JS, Haxe PHP and the SLPlayer of Intermedia (Silex-labs). Beside the main code written in Haxe, I wrote a php script to chunk the uploaded files and a JavaScript web-worker to upload multiple files using multi-threading. I must confess that I was particularly slow as I miss some experience with server-side development. Nevertheless, it was fun and these few weeks allowed me to build some valuable knowledge.

I am more than ever excited to explore Haxe further more, which seems to have infinite potential.
Recently, Massive Interactive released a couple of libraries: MassiveInject, MassiveMVC, MassivePartial and MassiveSignal and they are next on my list. Especially MassiveMVC and MassiveSignal that are ports of the AS3 libraries: RobotLegs & Signals. A combination of tools that I used many time in my AS3 projects.

One extra thing that I also learned this summer, is that, I missed developing games or data-visualizations and I hope that I will be involved in such work again soon.

So what’s next?

I was contacted by a media institute to give an AS3 course and a lecture on data-visualization in Amsterdam, and if this goes through, it will be a nice challenge ahead.

Begin September, I will be attending “Reasons to be creative” and I am really looking forward to meet inspiring people again and to join some of my friends over there.

Mid-September, I will be joining the PICNIC event in Amsterdam and my main goal will be to investigate the trends regarding Gamification, Serious-Games and Data-visualization.

I am currently available for contract work, so if need some help for your data-viz, mobile/web app/game, do not hesitate to contact me.

And… oh yeah, I am living for more than 7 years in the Netherlands now, and I am looking forward to hoist the mainsail for new international adventures. So if you are planning to develop the last generation game or some amazing data-visualizations, with Haxe in the other side of the planet… Guess what? well, I am totally in!

FOTB2011 MAIN TITLES from GMUNK on Vimeo.

It means a lot for me to be back in Brighton again, not only because of making a new record: yes, I made all 7 editions!
But because it is a wonderful time to gather with friends from all over the world. And also to benefit of the so inspiring energy of this creative community.

This year, beside the inspirational/arty talks, my planning will focus on data-visualization, games and cross-platform development. I am also very curious about the talk of my friends David Lenaert and Frank Reitberger who are presenting for the first time in Brighton (I think).

Monday 3rd Sept 2012

11:15 – 12:15 – MATT BARRINGER: “Design to divs via data and some bits in between” (data-viz)
12:30 – 13:30 – MEMO AKTEN: “FUCK CLIENTS Seriously.” (art / inspiration)
14:30 – 15:30 – STEFANIE POSAVEC: “Hand-crafted Data” (data-viz)
15:45 – 16:45 – MARIO KLINGEMANN: “Better Living Through Lasers” (art / inspiration)
17:00 – 18:00 – MARK BOULTON: “Failing and doing it well”
20:00 – 21:00 – BROSMIND: “This is our Momento!” (creative / inspiration)

Did I read “REASONS TO PARTY!” ?!?

Tuesday 4th Sept 2012

11:15 – 12:15 – FRANK REITBERGER: Highly Illogica (experiments / molehill / webGL)
12:30 – 13:30 – BJARKE MYRTHU: “The future of Digital Content” (data / storytelling / games)
14:30 – 15:30 – JOA EBERT: “Abstract Abstractions” (cross-platform / experiments)
15:45 – 16:45 – ANDREAS RONNING: “Cross platform game dev with Haxe NME” (cross-platform / games)
17:00 – 18:00 – LERNERT & SANDER: “Lernert & Sander all the way in Brighton” (art / inspiration)
20:00 – 21:00 – YVES PETERS: “Two Decades of Trajan in Movie Posters”

“REASONS TO PARTY!”, yes again ?!?

Wednesday 5th Sept 2012

10:00 – 11:00 – GIMME5: “Elevator’s pitch legacy” (5 mins talks)
11:15 – 12:15 – ANDRE MICHELLE: “Coming Soon” (experiments / inspiration / sounds)
12:30 – 13:30 – DAVID LENAERTS: “A Trick of Light” (experiments / 3D / shaders)
14:30 – 15:30 – DES TRAYNOR: “From Data To Insight” (data-viz)
15:45 – 16:45 – MIKE JONES: “Designing Game Interfaces” (games / usability)
17:00 – 18:00 – CHUCK ANDERSON: “What Plans? Figuring It Out As You Go” (creative / inspiration)

Looking forward to it with impatience. I will be in Brighton until Thursday afternoon, let me know if you are around!
Cheers

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COCKTAIL
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Cocktail is divided in 2 parts with a “core” which is platform independent, and a “port” which is target specific. Its is then possible to compile the same code for Actionscript and Js without any conditional compilation.
This allows developers to create their applications on multiple devices and OS.

Cocktail API can be compiled and packaged for

• mobiles and tablets (iOS, Android, BlackBerry…)
• desktop computers (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• televisions (Google TV, Adobe Air for TV, HbbTV (european smart TV standard))
• all major browsers, in HTML5 with a Flash fallback
• PHP, in order to be able to generate and manipulate the client “view” on the server side

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SMALL DEMO
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For this post I created a small proof of concept – Thanks to Raphael Harmel aka Codam for his help – to demonstrate how you can package the same code for mobile devices with 2 different options:

You can download the source here

:::: JS + PhoneGap ::::

- Compile the sources using build/HelloWorld_js.hxml
- Zip together all the files included in the bin folder with the exception of helloworld.swf and helloworld_air.xml.
- Go to https://build.phonegap.com/ (requires registration)
- Create a new app using the option “upload an archive or index.html file” and download your installer to test it on your device.
- Note that you need an Apple Developer Program (costs 99$), and an Apple provisioning file + an Apple p12 certificate to generate the iPhone/iPad installer.

:::: SWF + Air wrapper ::::

- Compile the sources using build/HelloWorld_as.hxml
- Wrap the helloworld.swf into an *.apk and an *.ipa file using helloworld_air.xml as manifest.
- Note that you will need the Air SDK and the Java JRE.
- Follow the help from Adobe to package your swf using Air.

Ha(xe)ppy coding!