Cahier #3 explores a series of concrete hackable citymaking practices in Athens, São Paulo and Shenzhen. Despite being situated on different continents and having distinct traditions and political systems, we found a number of dynamics around civic initiatives in these cities that further informed our Hackable city model.
This paper will explore how a portfolio approach to teaching and learning can help the educator incorporate unique forms of reflective practice into his or her daily work. By being able to express ideas more clearly to himself, the educator can better promote the relational construction of knowledge in his educational communities. This paper, as part of a larger body of research asks, how can a portfolio approach to teaching and learning help the educator develop unique forms of reflective practice that will help him express his ideas more clearly, first to himself and then secondly to his educational communities? Research methodology is primarily participatory action research and includes an autoethnographic review of the author's work, reviews, interviews, observations, and focus groups with student teachers and professional teachers in the United Arab Emirates. The research concludes that in consideration of McLuhan's (1964) notion that the "medium is the message," the interactions that arise through the use of new media tools can lead us to relational, co-constructed ideas that are not those simply passed on from other texts. By making our thinking visible, the portfolio approach allows the educator to capture the contextual relationship between the author, the audience or community, and the knowledge being created.
A level designer typically creates the levels of a game to cater for a certain set of objectives, or mission. But in procedural content generation, it is common to treat the creation of missions and the generation of levels as two separate concerns. This often leads to generic levels that allow for various missions. However, this also creates a generic impression for the player, because the potential for synergy between the objectives and the level is not utilised. Following up on the mission-space generation concept, as described by Dormans, we explore the possibilities of procedurally generating a level from a designer-made mission. We use a generative grammar to transform a mission into a level in a mixed-initiative design setting. We provide two case studies, dungeon levels for a rogue-like game, and platformer levels for a metroidvania game. The generators differ in the way they use the mission to generate the space, but are created with the same tool for content generation based on model transformations. We discuss the differences between the two generation processes and compare it with a parameterized approach.
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