Scirra’s Construct 2 – 5 Mobile Games in 5 Days Challenge

I recently received an email from Scirra with a free e-book that challenges me to make 5 mobile games in 5 games using their construct 2 platform.  I accepted the challenge. I will be posting here on this blog the results.  I will also be making modifications of my own to edit it.

Here is the poster banner for the e-book and the 5 day challenge.

If you are curious, you can read about some background on Scirra and their construct platform.

The first game is a touch bubble pop game.
They supply the tutorial and the resources needed, such as images and sounds.
They also supply links to resources to where to create these resources.

Here is the first game.

Some books I’ve been reading due to the lure of 4.3 star $0.99 e-books

In August 2014, I found a website called bookbub.com, while searching for a biography of Henry Ford for the kindle. The autobiography that I have found was excellent and I recommend people to read this, if you are interested in the mind of the innovator and industrialist.

I found on a site that linked to a page on bookbub. It was free, so I registered and found that it showing the cost of $0.99. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It linked to amazon.com, and it really was selling for $0.99. I purchased it. I explored bookbub for a bit and found that I had a filter that I can set. For example, I can set categories. So I did.

I removed all the best sellers category first, and cut out young adult romance, and adult romance, and paranormal romance, fiction, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thriller and everything else that seem to somehow include romance drama in them. Why are these so popular? I don’t understand. From what was left I removed kids and gladly went for non-fiction, business, parenting, biographies, history, and self help. This website would then send me an email with the list of books that I’m interested in that are on sale. . . like $0.99 cents, and sometimes $2.99. This lead me to read a lot of book between that time and now. Here are some good books that I have finished. Some are from book bub, and others are through recommendation by people or books that I have read (not in order):

  • Reviving Work Ethic by Eric Chester
  • The Payoff Principle by Alan Zimmerman
  • Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer
  • My Life And work by Henry Ford With Samuel Crowther
  • The Effective Executive by Peter Druker
  • Invisible Ink by Brian McDonald
  • 5 Minute Business by Mark Middo
  • How to win friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  • How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market by Nicolas Darvas
  • God With You At Work by Andy Mason
  • Breaking The Time Barrier by Mike McDerment

Still Reading and is pretty good as of yet (not in order):

  • The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
  • Non Ovbious by Rohit Bhargava
  • Engaging the Revelatory Realm of heaven by Paul Keith Davis
  • Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
  • Lets Write A Short Story by Joe Bunting

Want to read (not in order):

  • The Innovator’s Dilemma
  • The Third Wave
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Thing
  • Save The Cat
  • Practical Electronics For Inventors

That’s the most amount of books that I’ve read in a year. Many of the books I had completed in the last 6 months. It has done a lot to expand my mind. Now I know what that means.

 

STEM and STEAM education

STEM means Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.  It is an acronym that was used by the National Science Foundation in the early 2000s to describe the field of education in regards to science. It started to make headlines in 2008 and has been a topic of education since then. Schools started to adopt and gain grants for adopting STEM. Not too long ago, this realm has started to embrace the creative brother. One of the founder of STEM claims to unify both as follows: Science and Technology, interpreted through Engineering and the Arts, all based in elements of Mathematics, thus STEAM came to be.

I embrace this integration. I see the end of all the disciplines as tools for innovation, which is creativity. In my life, creativity is the joining point of technology/science and  design/communication(expression), and the reason why I was attracted to both the arts and technology.

STEAM

Steaming Stem

Here is an organization called SteamToStem

Check out the infographics on the difference between STEM and STEAM made by the University of Florida. I found it on upworthy.com

Maker Arm – Do it all with just one tool – An integrated maker’s tool

I can’t believe this type of tool is in the works.
Their claim is that this is “The first robotic arm that makes anything, anywhere”
It 3D prints, laser, carves, plots, assembles, picks/places and more on your desktop.

It is built with a simplistic design and an arm that is designed to have the precision and strength to accomplish all those things with a change of it’s tool head.  If this comes to pass it looks very promising and could possibly be an easy choice for the next generation of family-room makers.

Machines usually have a hard time being exceptional at one thing if they are doing too many things, but then the smartphone was the exception to that rule. Perhaps this can be as well.

Here is the Maker Arm kick starter link with the information: