According to the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey (ACS), women make up 48% of the total workforce of the United States, compared to 24% of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) based workforce. The United States Department of Commerce (2011b) reports that STEM occupations are projected to grow by 17% from 2008 to 2018, nearly twice as much as non-STEM occupations (9.8%). Even as more women pursue higher education degrees and are steadily increasing their numbers in the workforce, the number of women in STEM occupations has stayed at 24%. Furthermore, based on all the women who graduate with a STEM degree, 26% go on to work in a STEM occupation, compared to 40% of men. (2011a).
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Popularity: 2% [?]

Being a first time dad has been the most amazing experience of my life. Watching my daughter grow, and witnessing her constant exploration of the world around her has been extraordinary. Unfortunately when Mondays roll around, it is time for me and many other parents to drop off our kids at the babysitter.  The amount of time we get to interact with each other is very minimal, and pretty sad.

In a world where we all feel so “connected”, the people that matter most have no method of remotely interacting with us.  My 1 1/2 year has no twitter, or Facebook account to update.  She doesn’t check into fourSquare every time we go to grandma’s house. Even with mobile phones and Skype video conferencing, there is no direct method of me interacting with her without the assistance and supervision of an adult. So basically, we could only interact with each other when another adult has both the time and is willing to put in the effort to set up an environment for us to communicate.

This got me thinking “how can my daughter and I interact during my work hours?”  The first thing I did was identify the main characteristics of my daughter, back when I first started working on this project:

• My daughter was one year old.
• Her vocal communication ability was in the preliminary stages of development
• Her motor skills where still not fully developed, so complex tasks like using a keyboard or mouse where not possible.
• She needs adult assistance to use our everyday communication tools that available to us (moble and land-line phones, computers, etc).

At this young age, children are extremely dependent on their parents and other adults for just about everything.  However, there are also several activities that come as naturally as breathing and eating to a child. Two of those activities that i observed where exploration and play, many times triggered by a common catalyst of curiosity.

Children gradually explore their environment and toys and interacted with them, mastering the new skills that they learn along the way. Quickly they are able to identify all sorts of toy input locations which triggered various types of output, such as audio and visual feedback.
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Popularity: 6% [?]

So i finally had time to tinker around with this Simon Sez project again. Turns out there wasn’t an issue after all with my circuits, it was an issue in my code. I also did some house keeping on the code, and created a nice little diagram using Fritzing, an awesome app that was recommend to our class Read more

Popularity: 3% [?]

This past week I was trying to figure out what i could work on for my Physical Computing class. My professor mentioned, Simon, so why not take on the challenge. Simon was one of my favorite game, I even have it on my iPhone. For those that may not remember the Simon game check out this commercial.

Anyhow, armed with some basic knowledge of electronics, and some programming knowledge, why not! Bellow is my stab at Simon Read more

Popularity: 1% [?]

co-authored by: Adrienne Schafer

Background

Young children learn how to recognize and identify things such as numbers and letters at school. What they don’t learn from their teachers is how to recognize and properly express emotions. This is something they are expected to learn at home, but if a young child has been abused or lives in a household where the only emotions they’re exposed to are negative, they don’t have the opportunity to gain emotional intelligence and build emotional literacy. Young children need to be taught how to properly recognize and express their emotions to fully realize their potential and to avoid unnecessary conflict in school and social settings.

EEMIO, which stands for Enabling Emotional Instruction & Observation, is a physical toy coupled with a web site that provides children with activities and lessons that help them build their emotional intelligence or EQ by developing emotional vocabulary, also known as “feeling words” as well as coping mechanisms for emotional situations. A child’s inability to express or recognize emotions can lead to behavioral problems which extend to the classroom and ultimately affect their learning experience. By understanding and learning to identify different types of emotions, children can apply methods of self-regulation.

It can be difficult for adults such as social workers to get children to discuss their feelings if they try to sit down and talk about it. Allowing young children to interact with a toy and web site provides a level of safety and familiarity that encourages them to open up more. This approach allows adults to expand on topics the child might have touched upon during their interactions with the toy.

According to the Emotional Literacy Campaign at www.feel.org “ ‘Emotional Literacy’ is the ability to recognize, understand and appropriately express our emotions.”
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Popularity: 8% [?]

Note: XUI is developed for WebKit (hence it’s light weight) since that is the mobile browser of choice for most devices. If something doesn’t seem to work, try using Chrome or Safari since they too use Webkit.

Here is some code for a JavaScript, CSS, Twitter style status text area that i plan on using on a PhoneGap project i am working on. It makes use of the XUI Javascript framework, which i use throughout the project. XUI, compared to other Javascript frameworks is super light, and is developed by the the people behind PhoneGap
You could find the XUI framework at http://xuijs.com/

The code supports:

• 140 character count down
• Visual styling cue when you go over 140 characters
• prompting text when textarea is empty

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Today i decided to take trip to my wife’s school in Newark, NJ to see how Pre-K children liked the How Tall Prototype. Overall i got some pretty positive responses.  Bellow is a video of one of the children interacting with the game.  Unfortunately, i think most of the kids where distracted with the webcam video. When i do a more formal test I may use a handheld camera instead.  I think they where also a little shy with me in the room, so next time i may just have my wife run the test since they know her and may be more comfortable being expressive without a stranger in the room.

The video reveals something that should be noted. There was the success in using the response queues through the audio. If you look at the students mouth you could see her counting along, which assists in giving the child a more active role in learning.  It is hard to gauge the success of the the use of Wiimote, but I may looking into doing an engagement analysis another day.

How Tall Test from Alex Britez on Vimeo.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Jumped back on the the LED experiment tonight. This time i extended the events of the 3D object to handle single and multiple LED detection events.  If the 3D object only detects a single cursor then it only rotates the axis of the object being clicks. If it detects multiple cursors then it rotates the entire environment.

Eventually i think i will make this a multiuser molecule docking simulation, but for now i am just gonna consintrate on getting a decent prototype. This weekend I am gonna extend the events to the smaller objects so i could collaborate with another player, and eventually match poloraties of the molecules.  Should be pretty interesting once it is functional.

I could think of many different types of applications for this type of navigation. However, there are also many environmental issues, such as interference from objects with bright highlights such as metal, or direct light. One option that may solve that is using infrared LED’s instead and cover the webcam lens with a filter to be able to see the infrared.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Originally, i was going to build some accelerometer hardware to capture motion, but I’ve been tremendously busy.  Instead, I decided to take a stab at checking out some of the open source AS Wii libraries (Google Code).  The game itself is nothing to write home to mom, but I am interested in possibly researching the advantages of leveraging advanced inputs such as the WiiMote to better engage children. I think i may extend this game a bit more, and run a controlled group of children playing my game with the WiiMote, and children playing a similar game with the mouse.  Not sure if this would influence any additional knowledge transfer, but may influence children to play longer and more repetitive, which in turn may have some effect.  More on this topic when i totally wrap my head around the idea.

Wii How Tall from Alex Britez on Vimeo.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I just started my second semester of graduate school this week, and all of my professor at NYU thus far have brought up using wikis to hand in assignments. Wiki’s are an excellent source for knowledge management in the classroom, especially when you have multiple classes on varying topics. With all the new topics discussed in my classes, it is pretty easy for students to get overloaded with information. I’ve decided to extended my use of wikis to the workplace now, and am in the process of porting over a lot of my code that i reuse like proxies, and that dreaded crossdomain.xml .

I’ve also noticed a lot of professors use of Power Point to to narrate the class discussion. So being that I worked on empressr (a web-based slideshow presentation application), and now use my wiki constantly it only made sense to merge the both. Plus i couldn’t possibly get myself to use some other app asides from the one that I worked on.

The project could be found here unthink media Wiki and could be found on googlecode if anyone is interested in joining the project. Google code SVN repository

Popularity: 1% [?]