I love what Mitchell Whitelaw calls a generous interface. The traditional search box gateway to a collection is reticent, even officious, begrudging you for your lack of familiarity with the goods. By contrast, a generous interface hails the most casual passerby with a taste of the collection or – better still – the whole feast and before […]
The Sembl prototype will soon be playable! Here, Cath introduces the concept at the core of the game, as a prelude to an online tutorial for teachers.
Cath shares an overview of the Museum’s forthcoming real-time multiplayer iPad game, and an update on work-in-progress. First presented in person to the Apple University Consortium conference Create World 2011, it is available here as a PDF.
Sembl is all about connectedness – and I love that the kids who helped us playtest totally got that. Maybe by playing Sembl we really will save the world :) With that in mind, I present a music video from the wonderful Symphony of Science.
Because Sembl will be a system for generating data, I’ve been worrying about how we can ensure that the data it generates is well-structured so that it is machine-readable and thereby linked to other data and reusable in aggregation. But because both linked open data (LOD) and Sembl itself are all about relationships, whenever I […]
Seeking to identify sameness between disparate objects, we attend to their difference – and maybe even open space for reconciliation. In this post I tease out some of the conceptual and cognitive mechanisms in the game Sembl.
This week we hosted a group of 23 local students, aged 9 to 11, to playtest Sembl and share their experience with us. It was very useful for us, and fun all round, so thanks, 4/5TM from Curtin Primary.
So where have the devices come from? Who made them and why? Thinking on this, I came up with a backstory: A set of devices has been sent back from the future, after the apocalypse, when people have forgotten about the time before, what the world contained, how things worked, and what it all meant. […]
Very early on, our trusty developers had the idea to figure Sembl as a machine. Seeing as it’s an iPad app, we started to think about it as a handheld device, made of wood and metal, so *of course!* it wasn’t long before we started to draw on the wonderful steampunk zeitgeist for inspiration. I wondered how faithful we could […]
Dream announcement: the Museum is developing a prototype of an iPad game for teams of students visiting the physical space of the Museum. It’s called Sembl and I’m just a bit excited about it. The game Sembl is a game of relatedness. The challenge is to think about an object’s attributes – composition, shape, colour, […]