Wednesday, December 23, 2009

gDitty Comes Out of Hiding





An early Christmas present came to me this afternoon.  After writing about wanting to see the newer gDitty prototypes,  Maurina Venturelli, Web Communications and Social Media Consultant tweeted the Flickr set you see above.  It looks like they posted the album today! Now that's what I call a responsive Web 2.0 / Social Networking team.  In the pictures you see some pre-product shots and designs as well as what appears to be family focus groups and even some storyboarding / brainstorming sessions.

There is an intriguing shot of what appears to be simple push-activated lights on the floor. I'm trying to figure out why they would do this activity and it also reminds me of a toy by Wild Planet called Hyper Dash.  Using RFID tags in numbered mini- pucks, the object is to hit the correctly called number or color in the least amount of time possible.  I was contacted by Dan Botnick and he was generous enough to send out some Hyper Dash, Hyper Jump and Animal Scramble for me to try out in the lab and with my students.  Amazingly, college-aged students loved it as much as the children we work with. 

Thanks again to @HopeLab for rolling out these photos and I look forward to seeing any more peaks into the R&D of gDitty.  Happy Holidays!



2 comments:

  1. Stephen - glad you like the pics! Thanks for the kudos and your ongoing interest in what we're doing at HopeLab. Now that we're further along with the gDitty project, we're excited to be sharing what we've learned and where we're headed. A couple of things that might be of interest:

    1. The image you reference of a product that resembles Hyper Dash is actually a shot from a tween feedback session we conducted with some rough protoypes of winning ideas from our 2007-2008 Ruckus Nation idea competition (www.ruckusnation.com). We're not currently developing the idea pictured, but what we learned in those sessions with kids has deeply informed our work with gDitty. They were lots of fun too!

    2. We'll be sharing even more about gDitty in the coming weeks and months! Folks who are interested can follow us via our Sticky Notes blog (http://blog.hopelab.org) or Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/hopelab).

    Thanks again - and happy New Year!

    Richard Tate
    Director of Communications & Marketing, HopeLab

    ReplyDelete
  2. PS. We own our own Hyper Dash game! We played in here in the office once and worked up a sweat. :) It lives in my cube.

    Thanks for this post!
    -Liz (from HopeLab)

    ReplyDelete

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