I think with so much hybrid learning and remote teaching going on there's an opportunity for STEM education to become more equitable. Right now to learn about neuroscience you have to go to a university, pay hefty tuition fees, and even then access to really cutting edge technology is blocked by the high cost of research tools. There's nothing stopping us from building virtual versions of this same content.
My vision is that these are used as complements to low-cost in-person lab experiences, so maybe in a class people learn about neurons using a backyard brains setup and then they learn about the really cutting edge expensive tools using this virtual environment.
I built a board game in 2021 that has been just breaking the cutoff for this post, all I do is mail out a few games a week as we get orders. We do all our own fulfillment to save money. Currently trying to design a real video game. I got lucky with the board game because it targeted a really niche audience (rock climbers) and so we weren't really competing with the full board game market, which is honestly super saturated. I think launching a real video game will require taking a similar strategy, and I have some good ideas for this. If you know how to do 3D modeling and animation and have always wanted to make a game as a side project, send a message.
For anybody thinking of following on this path, I would say it's not really worth it except as a fun hobby. I didn't keep track of hours designing/testing very well but we're almost certainly way below minimum wage on the project. Although I've learned a lot about how to make games which has been really cool. You'll make a lot more money if you don't have to manufacture a real product and deal with the high costs of freight and postal shipping. If anybody is curious you can look up "5.15 climbing card game" on google and you'll find it!
On a discussion thread like this one, I think there is no shame in providing the homepage URL. Here it is after using your Google hint: https://five15game.com/
Awesome project. I initially youtube'd you, and there was no mention of your card game. I then startpage'd you and found a kickstarter page with a pretty well-made video... why don't you crosspost your video to youtube? and why don't you get someone to review it?
good point... I'm not sure why we never made the youtube video public. Thanks for bringing it up! This is why I feel like making that first game was good practice, I won't make these mistakes for the second one.
1. Does it have a good rating / breakdown in the BoardGameGeek forums?
2. Does it have a review on YouTube that showcases the main game mechanic?
Ideally, a third party review is always better. The board game community is not a harsh one (it's not like you have oceans of "this game sucks!" reviews -- there is a lot of love for the art) but a third party just seems more... relatable. They are also just trying to have fun.
I really like the idea of games for a niche audience. Does your game lend itself to being a "print & play" game? I launched a Print & Play version of my (very) niche game[0] because I didn't (yet) want to deal with the physical manufacturing and it's been a pretty good experience. Have you written about your journey on creating or manufacturing the game?
In early 2022, I'm going to manufacture a small number of the game using The Game Crafter (it's more than just cards), but the whole idea of manufacturing 500 copies and the logistics of shipping are daunting.
Looks like a fun game, I'll pass that on to some climber friends. Curious - where did you get the cards printed at? Working on a card game myself, but have been putting off researching that much after getting overwhelmed with options.
Depends on scale. For our initial play-testing I bought a bunch of plastic card sleeves and regular playing cards, and then printed out the 3"x5" game cards on my home printer. The playing cards are to make the card sleeves stiff and this way you can really quickly swap out your cards while play testing.
For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.
If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.
Thanks for the information and details! Yeah, we're using blank poker cards now and just drawing on them for play testing and that has worked well. I'll check out Game Crafter as a next step as I want some nicer sets to send to friends to help play test.
The author provided a compelling reason for this long-distance ebike: they have an injury and the acceleration assist allows them to cycle without aggravating the injury. I don't think it's fair to assume that every person who wants to cycle 200km can do so without electrical assist.
For this to be biological and not cultural we would need to see evidence that this happens before baby/infant primates are old enough to observe their parents performing similar behaviors, or when raised in isolation. The only citation here that matches that is the first one, and even then the experimenter was a part of the experiment and not blinded to infant sex, so there is a major possible source of bias there, and more recent papers appear to contradict this effect [1]. Rather than cite one-off studies from the 2000s this is a situation where a meta-analysis or review would be ideal, but I don't see one in a quick search. If you are aware of one that would be helpful to better understand this claim.
I cited the 2000 study because it was the first one doing this type of experiment at a very early age (the babies were 36 hours! old).
No, that's wrong, it was properly blinded:
The videotapes were coded by two judges who were blind to the infant’s sex, to calculate the number of seconds
the infants looked at each stimulus. A second observer (independent of the first pair and also blind
to the infants’ sex) was trained to use the same coding technique for 20 randomly selected
infants to establish reliability.
If you want more, here is another one on newborn macaques:
I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Cascadilla Hall, but this seems like a lot of exaggeration. For others who want to see what these dorms look like, you can see images of the Cascadilla rooms alongside more modern campus dorms like Mews on this page: https://conferenceservices.cornell.edu/planning/accommodatio....
Mews looks pretty unfortunate, yes. It's bad when the realtor taking a picture from the extreme corner of the room to make the room look big style photos still make a room look like a prison cell.
I really hope you pay close attention to the comments by assdf replying to this. The graduate students clearly got desperate because of how crazy the financial situation got. It's sad to see how few people really recognize that. I hope you're lucky in life and never end up trapped the way they were!
Some caveats to think about for that particular book in this blog post: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ (I'm not a researcher in the area, so not sure how valid either side of this is!)
An interesting read, but the article comes across as an unhinged attack piece brimming with silliness. Better to get a take from a proper scientist with more balanced views.
Point number one of his list of 'egregious' errors is the idea that shorter sleep does not imply shorter life span, but all of the recently published meta-analyses make that connection convincingly (for the population sleeping <6 hrs). Anyone can look up these studies. And Walker does not advise people to sleep 9+ hrs (which is also thought to be a risk group on a population level). The author of the piece from the outset is quite evidently arguing in bad faith.
There is criticism to be had on Walker, he overstimulates his readers with fear-inducing statements which can definitely backfire.
Continual small improvements is exactly what Tesla does. That's why so many of the small issues listed in the article have since been fixed (as the article points out).
Can this clickbait title be fixed? This is a news article covering a review. The review suggests that the (small) cognitive effects of caffeine and other things present in chocolate have mechanisms that are starting to be understood, in rodents.
Because it's a review it provides no new evidence unlike the implication in the title. Instead, it's suggesting possible neural pathways for why the cognitive effects might exist.
I think with so much hybrid learning and remote teaching going on there's an opportunity for STEM education to become more equitable. Right now to learn about neuroscience you have to go to a university, pay hefty tuition fees, and even then access to really cutting edge technology is blocked by the high cost of research tools. There's nothing stopping us from building virtual versions of this same content.
My vision is that these are used as complements to low-cost in-person lab experiences, so maybe in a class people learn about neurons using a backyard brains setup and then they learn about the really cutting edge expensive tools using this virtual environment.