Has anyone ever told you a skill was worthless, or you’d never need to do that, so why bother?  Well, for the last few weeks we’ve been doing a rather daunting project on the side, all for the sake of pushing our limits and learning new things. When I stand back and look at the results so far, I’m wondering how it relates to this company, our portfolio or anything having to do with training… the short answer is.. it doesn’t.  But, there’s always a bright site to digression – sometimes you stumble upon things you never knew were possible simply because you became curious.

A very rough draft

The project idea initially was to create a sushi-eating interaction, where you could take on the role of a person shoveling various types of sushi into their mouth. Over three weeks it went from that into a giant monster attack destruction game, where users control laser eyeballs of a giant robot, slime, or chupacabra as it destroyed the giant 3d city.

We built the 3D city next

Everything we’re working on is animated with programming, or scripted particle effects, combined with the user ability to upload a photo of whoever, and place it into the giant menacing monster to add some humor and a personal touch – all of which can be saved and sent to a friend.

Here you can upload a photo, rotate and resize, change your monster's name, and choose what monster you'd like

The further we get into this project the more complex ideas pop up, and the more we seem to learn. So besides the fact there’s nothing you can learn from blowing up cars with a laser beam, we’re now more proficient in database management, file saving and uploading, email integration, action script programming and file compression. On the creative end we also managed to design the entire city with Swift 3D – modeling and lighting our way to a miniature city look and feel that couldn’t be created in Flash alone.

Put them all together and you get some exciting results!

Sometimes it’s just nice to try something off topic and a little different. We’ll launch a working version in a week or so, until then.. I’ve got some rubble to draw.

Earlier this week we wrapped up and launched Edheads Design a Cell Phone activity at www.edheads.org. With the help of Motorola, as well as the Ohio State University College of Engineering we approached the idea of getting girls interested in Engineering careers.

It ends up, boys like to blow things up, build things, work with machines, while girls tend to stay away, but for what reason? The activity uses the idea that we can use design and engineering to help people (in this case senior citizens), not just give them something cool to look at.  In the end with the right product we can better their lives.

Edheads Engineering - Design a Cell Phone

Creating the activity was a short but rewarding process – we created a design application where users can build a near infinite number of different phone styles using our 100% script based phone builder. We had to put the breaks on certain aspects to fit the activity, but overall it’s a very intuitive and rewarding feature which has already been used 97,000 times in the first week since launch (based on our lesson tracking data).

Through the process we worked along side Ohio State, as well as Motorola engineers to create a situation where the user needs to not only research and design, but listen to consumer feedback in order to get the best sales results. If you ignore the research you won’t know what sort of phone to build, and chances of being successful go down quite a bit.

Interview the senior citizens

This is the first non linear activity we’ve built for Edheads, and it’s already proving its educational value based on user testing, critiques and overall response. For some additional information on the launch, check out The Ohio State Engineering news site for a little blurb on the project. Motorola also has a bit of info on their overall educational initiative used to help fund the project at their news site.

Engineering Sales Results

We have many more engineering project topics to explore, it’s just a matter of time and funding – next up starting late July we begin ‘Nanotech’ – something to do with fabrics, but that’s all I can say.