Kinection will be at the following conferences in November. If you’re attending as well, drop us a line and we can see about meeting up:
This week we submitted our deliverables for Phase I of the “Task-based Communications Training System” to the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The deliverables included a review of language and culture training solutions currently in use by the Marine Corps (our first target customer), a set of competencies for the first phase of the project, and a curriculum for basic language, culture, and nonverbal behaviors.
The project will use games to help Marines learn basic communication and cultural skills for selected regions. A key difference from existing solutions is that Marines will be able to tailor the curriculum to the kinds of tasks they will perform while deployed — so a Rifleman working patrols will have one study path, while a Medic preparing for a humanitarian mission will have another. This customization will allow Marines to develop basic competence in targeted areas much more quickly.
I highly recommend the new game “Limbo” for its “film noir” look, eerie atmosphere and challenging spatial puzzles. It’s a big grisly, but there’s a gore filter you can turn off if you don’t like to watch your little guy getting his head chopped off (which will happen to you over, and over, and over again). I finished the game, and only needed two hints to do it (which, at my level, I take to be pretty good!)
The game successfully creates a strong sense of mystery and anticipation… sensations that learners often feel when exploring something they’re curious about, but that are largely missing from most eLearning programs. We as learning designers can learn something from Limbo’s atmospheric approach.
We (my family and I) wrapped up our annual trek to Japan with a visit to Ginkaku-ji in Kyoto. Ginkaku-ji, the “Temple of the Silver Pavilion,” is famous for its rock and traditional gardens as well as its exotic wildlife. After the hustle and bustle of the streets of Kyoto, the beauty and the tranquillity of the gardens is almost overwhelming. –Scott Meadows
Ed has been accepted as an adjunct teacher in the computer science curriculum at Concorde Career College’s Memphis campus. Nice job, Ed!
I graduated from San Jose State University with a Bachelors of Creative Arts. Apparently my fellow students didn’t get enough of me sharing my opinions during our classes so they asked me to give the commencement speech! –AJ Shultz
Doug Nelson and Scott Meadows met in Washington D.C. with representatives from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) — including Program Manager Ivy Estabrooke — and Allison Abbe from the Army Research Institute (ARI), to kick off Kinection’s language and culture project. This project, which will extend over the next two years, will focus on providing basic language and culture training for the Navy and Marines.
Wiley Publishing releases the book “Excel Formulas and Functions for Dummies.” Ed Lavieri served as the Technical Editor (2nd edition).
Ed Lavieri was accepted into the Doctorate of Computer Science program with an Emerging Media specialization at Colorado Technical University’s Institute of Advanced Studies. Congratulations, Ed!
I started playing Borderlands on the XBox 360. It is touted as the first of a new game genre called role-playing shooter (RPS). (Last year, Doug got me hooked on Fall-Out 3 and I thanked him with some Gears of War curb-stomps). Borderlands is a nice mix of those two games. –Ed Lavieri
Kerri and I celebrated our one year anniversary with a trip to Hawaii (one month early). We literally spent days on this beach doing exactly what the picture shows, soaking up the sweet Hawaii sun. –AJ Shultz
I have returned from a trip to Omino Moonibase on planet Santa Cruz, where I designed the game Vortex (a version of Twister for zero-gravity environments) and later communed with various other races while dining on astronaut-friendly cubed food. Vortex was quite a hit among the Romulans and the space vixens of Zeta Reticuli.
In January 2010, Small Group Leaders at the Fort Huachuca NCO Academy incorporated an activity designed by Kinection into their Senior Leader Course, to highly positive feedback. The activity, designed to help students recognize the value in perspective-taking and rapport-building and develop their own capacities in these areas, was a “choose your own adventure” scenario with multiple paths to outcomes. The story was closely based on a real-life critical incident in Afghanistan.
The Kinection team began their first group book study. Chapters were set, assignments and projects based on those chapters were given, and at the end of the week we would meet and share what each of us had learned.
We’re developing highly interactive 3D tools, so it was natural for us to go to the Oct. 27-30 Unity3D Unite conference in San Francisco. Unity3D is a multiplatform game development tool designed to make it easier to create and publish 3D games.
Unity does take time to learn, but its “unified” approach to development really shines. We were inspired by talking with groups that had published full titles using teams of only two to four people.
Kinection has been using Unity3D for about two years. We started using it to prototype new approaches to using 3D environments for basic language instruction. For us, Unity has proven to be a good way to create 3D immersive environments that can be deployed on the web, desktop, or iPhone. This helps us meet our goal of developing a wrap-around environment of highly accessible learning tools.
Cathy, Brian, and I took a trip to Fort Riley this month for data collection. We met with over 60 soldiers ranging from corporals to LT colonels. Our sessions consisted of small group question and answers. During our visit, we were provided insights into their recent deployment experiences including cultural perspectives, roles, duties, and tasks requiring cross-culture competencies, and training preferences.
This data collection effort mirrored our previous trips to Fort Carson and Fort Leonard Wood. At Fort Riley, we received some key insights regarding the processing time at Kuwait for Soldiers headed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Additional eye-openers for us included the roles the Chaplain Corps, cultural liaisons, and interpreters play with respect to language and culture.
It was a positive experience talking with the men and women at Fort Riley. We appreciate their taking the time to provide us with their insights, perspectives, and opinions.
Doug was invited by the U.S. Army to conduct scenario training for the Regional Command North Training Event at the Joint Force Training Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland. More than one hundred soldiers from nine NATO and Partnership for Peace Nations participated, along with representatives of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police.
The Kinection team completed Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) certification training this month. CITI provides education that ensures that researchers know how to treat research subjects ethically.
CITI training covers protection of human research subjects, good clinical practice, health information privacy and security, and responsible conduct for researchers.
Our certification is part of our commitment to the ethical research that guides the design of our tools.
On June 3-4, 2009, Kinection attended the U.S. Army Research Institute’s (ARI) Intercultural Assessment and Training Tools Interim Project Review meeting in Crystal City, Virginia. During this two-day event, companies with intercultural SBIRs through ARI shared their project status and discussed opportunities for collaboration. Read more…