Sandbox Lab - Thursday from 9AM-11AM on the College of Education Building 3rd floor conference room

[ANDREA POLLI]

Thanks, Chris, it would be great if you could go to this next week, and anyone else in our group who is available this week or next. 

I am glad you brought up the issue of lab layout.  It has been very frustrating to see that many computer labs are set up in a traditional classroom format with rows facing the front.  Over 15 years ago, I was part of a national group of faculty studying effective lab space layout for design and production, and we found that one line of computers around the periphery of a room with screens facing in and a meeting table in the center for group work and discussion was by far the most useful.  Teachers could see what their students were working on in the entire room at a glance and during discussions students were turned away from their distracting screens.  Labs in Art & Art History and CS/ECE are designed this way, it would be good to see it in more labs on campus.

Yours;

Andrea

--
Andrea Polli
Mesa Del Sol Chair of Digital Media
Associate Professor, Fine Arts and Engineering

UNM Center for the Arts, Bldg 62  MSC04-2570
University of New Mexico ABQ, NM 87131
www.andreapolli.com

and...@andreapolli.com

skype: andreapolli

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From: "Chris Holden" <chris.l...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 9:14 AM
To: unm-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Possible Sandbox Lab Opportunity

Dang. I can't go today either, but I would be happy to go next week (if my baby boy isn't here yet). I would really like to be able to give input on this sort of thing. 

An example that might be worth sharing is my recent ARIS Global Game Jam. Johann, Anne, and others at Centennial were very kind and gave us some space to use in Centennial for mobile game design. The room in the library that's essentially perfect for this task is 155 (not a room that's available for registration, just a good example of room design for this sort of thing). The room we chose was the conference room (255) and not the computer lab (253). Having a space that lends itself to small team collaboration (tables for a few people each, whiteboards, a couple big screens to throw up communal resources, easy to reach power for many laptops, reconfigurable to match circumstances) is more important for game design than having a bunch of computers. The facing forward, fixed desk situation that is typical of computer labs makes this kind of work very difficult. The very large basecamps for the Jam in Madison, often instructing 50 students at a time, with many more rooms to choose from, found rooms similarly configured, large rooms probably more intended for lunches and keynotes, to be perfect for them.

As a point of minutiae, large TVs are far better than projectors in my opinion. They are easier to view in any circumstance, do not become almost useless in good lighting, have better color rendition, are easier to hook up to on the fly, last essentially forever unless they are damaged instead of having bulbs that burn out every few thousand hours, have higher resolution for less money, etc.

[Chris Holden]

Sorry all. I didn't make this meeting today.