Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself.
> incarcerated students really want to learn
They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated.
> children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens
Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse.
> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.
For those wondering what this game is all about, this is the interesting part:
"Voxatron is based on a virtual 128x128x64 display. It's a buffer of 3d video memory that is rendered out to the screen at the end of each frame, much as an old-school 2d display is. You can POKE bytes into the virtual memory, and they come out as voxels. I don't compromise on this -- even the menus are drawn into the voxel display. Hopefully one day I can get hold of a real physical 128x128x64 display and play Voxatron on it with almost no modification."
The game is a top-down shooter in the vein of Robotron, but with 3D environments. It features volumetric equivalents to many basic 2D graphics operations: a scrolling background, sprites, animations, particle systems, physics, etc.
Everything is destructable too. If you shoot enough holes in an object, it will collapse in a heap of voxels.
It even includes a level editor.
The game looks fantastic and I've never heard of anything like it. If you are even remotely interested in games or realtime graphics, you need to see this.
If there's too much structure for the developers alone, then we need to enable the community to contribute that structure, in addition to content. But can the application be genericized enough to cover all of the shopping domains without being completely washed out?
Think about the different kinds of web content that you read when making buying decisions. Off the top of my head, there's recommendations/searches (to discover things), consumer reviews/ratings (to evaluate them) and expert "buying guide" type articles (to gain a deeper understanding of a non-trivial decision). Currently, using all of these sources involves a lot of Googling and jumping from site to site. What if a single site could encapsulate all of them?
This site would aggregate prices and host reviews of individual products. Products could also be tagged as belonging to any number of "aisles" of varying degrees of specificity like "Sporting Gear", "Wall Sconces", "Gifts for Mom", "2 Inch Tapered Drywall Screws", "Eco Friendly", and so on. The aisles would be user created and could be just about anything. Individual users can have their own personal aisle for things they own or want. Stores can have their own aisle too (which would be a likely area for monetization). Each aisle would have a hub page showing the highest rated products, sub-aisles and related aisles, external links, and user written guides, faqs and whatever else they want to write. The idea would be to make the content model flexible enough to adapt to the needs of any special domain and to the different situations consumers find themselves in.
Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself.
> incarcerated students really want to learn
They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated.
> children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens
Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse.
> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.