A visual way to pass information about mechanisms of software projects.
An art project that uses game design and art techniques to encode. show and educate people about principles and specific mechanisms of open source software projects, networks and components. It contains a set of reusable visual open source software tools, art libraries and guides for quick discovery, debug and validation. These tools are used to create "inspectors" and "tutorials" that allow people to interact with real software to speed up learning process through gameplay and full spectre of senses. Public domain for maximum reusability and with full credits for authors.
The problem. People find it easier to write things from scratch instead of learning how software works. Learning how software works is hard and time consuming. Most information about how specific programs work is text that assumes a lot of prior context that is also passed by text. At the same time we know that brain absorbs visual information much quicker. Maybe tens of thousands times quicker. And I suspect that visuals that are also properly encoded in time fall into us much better. Quoting Socrates --> Plato --> Aristotle we also need to encode ideas into emotions to make people remember them.
Authors of software projects know how to write code, and a little about documentation, but they are rarely skilled in game design, arts and screenwriting to pass information and make it remarkable to their audience. If only we could see memory and code how it works in real time, we could learn much faster and understand programs better. If we could retell development as an audio/visual story, more people will remember. If we attach visualizations and audio to real processes and decompose them using graphical objects and assign animation to them according to events and changes, we could inspire more people to get creative. Books like The Architecture of Open Source Applications or AOSA book written with Blueprints help could attract people who are not yet proficient in software and make them literate in how computers work.
We are being taught that UML is the rightful way to describe software, but it is awful. No gamer ever will read UML, and hacking over the past decades over the human brain we can do better. Imagine if we use best of the best gaming practices and apply it to sync and expand people knowledge through network affect and validation. So that new chapters in software and human development are written in a positive way as an alternative to barbed wire from Amnesty International logo that guards information encoded in text against our other sensory feelings.
A visual way to pass information about mechanisms of software projects.
An art project that uses game design and art techniques to encode. show and educate people about principles and specific mechanisms of open source software projects, networks and components. It contains a set of reusable visual open source software tools, art libraries and guides for quick discovery, debug and validation. These tools are used to create "inspectors" and "tutorials" that allow people to interact with real software to speed up learning process through gameplay and full spectre of senses. Public domain for maximum reusability and with full credits for authors.
The problem. People find it easier to write things from scratch instead of learning how software works. Learning how software works is hard and time consuming. Most information about how specific programs work is text that assumes a lot of prior context that is also passed by text. At the same time we know that brain absorbs visual information much quicker. Maybe tens of thousands times quicker. And I suspect that visuals that are also properly encoded in time fall into us much better. Quoting
Socrates --> Plato --> Aristotlewe also need to encode ideas into emotions to make people remember them.Authors of software projects know how to write code, and a little about documentation, but they are rarely skilled in game design, arts and screenwriting to pass information and make it remarkable to their audience. If only we could see memory and code how it works in real time, we could learn much faster and understand programs better. If we could retell development as an audio/visual story, more people will remember. If we attach visualizations and audio to real processes and decompose them using graphical objects and assign animation to them according to events and changes, we could inspire more people to get creative. Books like The Architecture of Open Source Applications or AOSA book written with Blueprints help could attract people who are not yet proficient in software and make them literate in how computers work.
We are being taught that UML is the rightful way to describe software, but it is awful. No gamer ever will read UML, and hacking over the past decades over the human brain we can do better. Imagine if we use best of the best gaming practices and apply it to sync and expand people knowledge through network affect and validation. So that new chapters in software and human development are written in a positive way as an alternative to barbed wire from Amnesty International logo that guards information encoded in text against our other sensory feelings.