UPDATE: We’re located at booth 26, next to Science Friday and TinkerCad.

New York – Sifteo is coming your way next week!

First, I’m personally excited to attend the second annual Open Hardware Summit, an event that brings together independent hardware designers, artists, hackers, and generally awesome people in the world of hardware. There will be plenty of interesting discussions and exchanging of new ideas on the growing Open Source Hardware movement.

Second, Dave will be delivering a special presentation at the New York Game Conference on September 22 about the fusion of classic games with modern technology. This is a topic that encapsulates pretty much everything we’re about here at Sifteo, and we’ll be sharing it with numerous gaming and entertainment executives.

But perhaps what we’re anticipating most about our New York escapade is Maker Faire New York 2011, taking place at the New York Hall of Science between September 17 and 18. SCIENCE! Continued »

Sweet – we got a design award from Fast Company: an IDEA (International Design Excellence Award). Thanks to our industrial designers over at New Deal Design! We got a silver – not too shabby. But we’ll get that gold next time.

In addition to our CES Innovation Award, our Dieline packaging award (here and here) and our I.D. Magazine award from a few years back, among others, I guess we can officially dub Sifteo cubes as “award winning.”

Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times writes about the relationship between games, kids and life. Her take is precise but nuanced, and worth a quick read.

The piece identifies a conflict between games and life. A good game provides a controlled environment to its player – never too hard, never too easy – while life provides a tricky and chaotic environment life to its “player” – sometimes complex and confusing, sometimes silent and boring.

As game designers specifically interested in exercising certain thinking skills, we at Sifteo think about this a lot. How do the experiences we create challenge and entertain our players? How do those experiences transfer to other pursuits in life? How specifically do we need to identify those transfers?

Now, some games seem inherently worthwhile. We don’t worry too much about whether they are explicitly teaching us about topic A or life skill Z. Paradoxically, we may not question these games’ merit because we have an unstated, gut feel that they do in fact provide valuable lessons for life in general, even though we don’t always articulate them. Chess, crossword puzzles and sports would qualify.

Now if asked, we can fairly easily to come up with reasons why these games are good for you – they nurture planning and reasoning, or language and pattern matching, or discipline and teamwork.

As we at Sifteo build new-to-the-world games, we will work to point out these why’s explicitly, by identifying the skills we believe each game exercises. Our job, I think, is to continually work to make games that are truly great: great because they provide experiences that we know, at a gut level, exercise these skills – game that we implicitly know are worthwhile.

Every two weeks, everyone on the team summarizes their work and plots out their goals for the next two weeks. In particular, each person writes a haiku that serves as a two week retrospective.

Why do we do this? I am not exactly sure, to tell you the truth. But we do. And it is awesome.

In particular, we had some real winners on Monday, from two of our intrepid interns, Igor Napolskikh and Regan Chan.

Without further ado:

Let my paintbrush flow,

For the computer nerds in the house: A perceptron!

We came across a fascinating article in the New York Times about perceptual learning.

The upshot: researchers and teachers are using rapid-paced pattern recognition tasks to help students learn abstract concepts. For example, instead of doing traditional, paper-based math problems in order to learn the relationship between an equation and a graph (the way I learned algebra in high school), the student uses a computer program that presents an equation and a set of graphs. The student has to choose the graph that matches the equation — and the student has to go fast, moving through a series of such problems.

The idea is to develop a “gut instinct” – to recognize patterns – in order to scaffold a student’s ability to understand the abstractions and principles being taught. It’s a fascinating “bottom-up” approach to teaching “top down” ideas.

When I was in school, we learned top down ideas, well, top down.

I am not surprised these techniques work. I’m no expert, but I did study artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and I did some neuroscience research after college. A key lesson for me: the brain is really good at sifting through and identifying patterns, even in really noisy, messy environments. When this pattern recognition faculty is joined up with abstract reasoning, pretty awesome things can happen. Indeed, when these two styles of thinking come together in the right way, it feels fun.

Games like chess and poker bring all three of these things together (pattern recognition, reasoning and fun), and we all correctly admire and respect the true masters of these pursuits. I’d say we accord this respect because we think that mastery of these games points at skills we think we all ought to have, no matter what we do in life.

Looping back to perceptual learning: At Sifteo, our goal is to provide fun and engaging experiences that exercise different thinking skills. We hope to explore how we can apply perceptual learning ideas to our games – after all, our combination of interactivity, tactility (and fun) seems really well suited to the basic tenets of perceptual learning.

We’ll be at Zeum in San Francisco, one of the coolest museums out there, every Wednesday from June 8, 2011 to August 31, 2011 (1pm – 3pm) – if you want to try out Sifteo cubes and learn more about us, come on by.

We are really lucky to be working with Zeum – soon to be the Children’s Creativity Museum – since they know so much about what makes great experiences for families and they attract such great folks to come visit.

Thanks to all of you – and there were a lot of you! – who visited us at Maker Faire last weekend. We had a blast. Special thanks to Dale, Michelle and all the Maker Faire people for putting together such a great event and letting us be a part of it.

We got a lot of great questions – so for the interested reader, here’s a short Q&A:

Q: When can I get these Sifteo cubes??

A: Later this year! We are working hard on getting Sifteo cubes out to the world.

Q: Is there going to be an SDK?

A: YES! We feel strongly that all the MAKERS out there will create crazy, here-to-fore-unknown, useful, weird, silly, powerful, amazing applications with Sifteo cubes. We want to see it happen! We are also looking at ways to enable folks who may not have software development skills to customize and build games for their family’s and their friends’ use. Stay tuned.

Q: What games are you guys at Sifteo making now?

A: We’re constantly building new apps, and right now we are organizing the effort around the theme of “Intelligent Play“™ – the more we learn from our early users, the more we see that we ought to build games that engage adults and kids by challenging their thinking skills: whether that be spatial reasoning, symbol arrangement, and so on. (Really, so many great games from ancient times all the way to the present day work in that same way.) As we’ve known for awhile, Sifteo cubes’ unique combination of tactility and interactivity tap into something special about how people’s minds and hands work together – so we’re building games that work along that theme. We want to make games you can feel good about!

Q: Are these from MIT? Was there a TED talk?

A: Yes! Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, the founders of Sifteo, created the initial idea behind Sifteo cubes with a project called “Siftables” – Dave debuted it at TED in 2009 when it was just a student research project. We’ve been crankin’ since then!

Sifteo is going to be at Maker Faire this weekend, May 21 – 22. Come on down! We got a super last minute spot (thanks so much, Maker Faire!)

We’ll be showing off the Sifteo cubes and games, and we’ll show you the inside guts of the cubes as well! We crammed a lot of technology in each one and we will display it with pride.

Find us inside in the Fiesta Hall. I don’t know _exactly_ where we’ll be: somewhere in there!

We at Sifteo are lucky to have support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in the form of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. The NSF is a federal governmental organization charged with promoting science and engineering research and education, and it’s cool that they felt Sifteo was worth promoting.

I (Jeevan) am currently at NSF grantee meeting in Baltimore and I’m having good conversations with friends old and new that also have received NSF grants. Thank you NSF!