Soda loves art, learning and play. Our Journal combines News with other entries by Team members.
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Strandbeests walk in London 5 July 06
Theo Jansen’s remarkable Strandbeest are visiting London where they went for a walk in Trafalgar Square before settling down for an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. His incredible wind-powered walking creations pre-date Sodaconstructor by several years and often bear an uncanny likeness to some Sodaconstructor models.
Soccer World Cup on soda? 5 July 06
There aren’t many soda members taking an interest in the world of soccer (well, there are some) but with the World Cup in Germany unfolding it can hardly be ignored. And I just found a nice web 2.0 aspect to the whole thing:
Yahoo/FIFA have a section on the official World Cup site called the 12th man. Among other things they invite their visitors to share their countless pictures using certain tags on flickr. Some of these pictures are then added to a gallery. Unfortunately they apply a very not-flickr-like moderation to the whole thing so that the gallery has only a few hundred images whereas flickr already sports several thousend correctly tagged pictures.
But still, it is good to see what used to be a niche practice entering the main stream (it is FIFA after all). And we have very recently done something similar sans moderation on b.tween2cultures.net, too.
The joys of parameterization 30 June 06
A hidden gem of parameterized tests discovered in Junit 4 javadocs.
While developing the tests for the new sodaplay.com, which needed to test that certain pages generated correct links no matter the name of the context path… That’s a pain because you want to repeat the same tests with just a single parameter difference (the context path). And I’m going to have to do that for each page that I want to test…
School Robot test drive 21 June 06
Matt and Fiddian were delighted by the children’s response to the prototype robot Soda has created for them with the help of Creative Partnerships London East. They were incredibly excited and took immediate ownership of the child sized mobot (Mobile Robot). Their first impressions were: “it’s sweet” , “it’s fast” and “it’s like a footballer!”
Futurelab’s Digital Tools resource 13 June 06
As part of their innovative ‘Enquiring Minds’ programme Futurelab have compiled a growing list of freely available digital tools for the support of learning activities. This extensive list of tools and resources of course references our very own Moovl and Sodaplay
Issues behind the success of US tech startups 13 June 06
I recently read this article by Paul Graham, sent through by Jose Marinez (fellow PhD’er and PeopleLab person). I found it especially interesting as all this stuff about cultures of innovation and enterprise seems really topical at the moment. I, abeit sometimes grudingly, agree with most of what Paul Graham says but what really resonates is the stuff about the openness (or sloppiness?) of American schools when compared to the exam passing factories that are the ‘better’ British schools. This factor coupled with entreprenerial attitude and the availability role models rings true for me as fundamental reasons for this difference.
together we are irrepressible 28 May 06
Join us in defending freedom of expression on the Internet with Irrepressible.info, a campaign conceived and realised by Soda for Amnesty International.
in between 13 May 06
Soda is proud to be speaking at b.tween06 and creating a new artwork in collaboration with Chinese artist Yang Lei called b.tween2cultures.net.
Sodaconstructor engineering workshops @Bristol 12 April 06
The Science Learning Centre at @Bristol have been granted EPSRC funding to do Angela McFarlane‘s proposal of running a scaled-up version of David Shaffer and Gina Svarovsky’s Sodaconstructor engineering workshops in the UK
Re-visioning Vision London 11 April 06
Soda are working with young people from schools across East London, Liz Jewell and Creative Partnerships London East and on a project that will consider how, if possible, technology could be used to provide a platform for young people to have a creative, legitimate and autonomous voice in regards to the various regeneration initiatives that are currently transforming young people’s spaces in East London such as the Olympics, Building Schools for the Future and Thames Gateway Regeneration.
Sodarace forum discovers Wikipedia 28 March 06
The Sodarace Forum have just discovered Wikipedia and are doing a good job at co-ordinating their creation of a Sodaplay page. Very promising in light of forthcoming Sodaplay 2.0 aspirations for a community of content and context creators.
Customisations 16 February 06
When talking about playforge modules last year, we had an idea that XML-based ui definitions might be helpful. Some of us had had some experience with XUL/Mozilla - and saw the power. We thought initially, maybe we take some sort of existing framework and integrate it. However the more we’ve looked the more we come to believe that our requirements are slightly different to most of the XUL-like options out there.
Lister Light Project 25 January 06
This is an iterative project working with students and teachers from Lister Community School in East London funded by Creative Partnerships London East and NESTA. The project is a micro example of how the school are trying out new ways of working by creating cross-curricula space within the timetable for thematic creative projects that are specific to various subjects, in the case of the Light Project, art, science and ICT.
The project is the focus of a research group at London Southbank University who are evaluating this project as part of a wider consideration of how the school as a whole becomes a more creative environment and community.
Annotations 3 December 05
Currently in the playforge development we’re using annotations to help with specifying “persistence” (really serialisation&marshalling, but it’s always within the context of saving and loading) and ”bindings” (hooking up XML-specified UIs to the execution of java code during runtime). Some people might well ask (especially those who have read around the issues about “Annotation Hell” or “Annotation Overkill”) why use annotations for this at all, why not just use method-naming standards and normal java introspection?
Bindings 3 December 05
Have started to make it possible to make a ui described in one or more xml files to be connected (bound) to code in a (java) application. There are two kinds of relationship currently envisaged:
- simple callbacks representing a one-way execution of code from the ui
for example, code that is invoked when a button is pressed - variables representing a two-way relationship of code to the ui
for example, a slider that not only controls some feature of the application (e.g. the gravity slider in constructor), but might itself respond ("listen") to changes in the application, as in the selected slider in the constructor application is indicated simultateously in both the main simulation window and in the sinewave window on the left. In a new version of the constructor application there might be sliders (or even just numeric editors) that can control the position (x and y values) of the selected mass and also reflect changes in its position.