game design philosophy

Less Talk More Rock: The native language of video games
is neither spoken nor written

Nuff said.

Efficient space navigation

Erika DeBenedictis took the top prize (and $100K) in the Intel Science Talent Search.

Her project appears to be primarily based on a computational problem -- efficient navigation through the solar system using gravitational interactions:

Working at home and building on existing research, Erika developed an original optimizing search algorithm that discovers energy minimizing routes in specified regions of space and would allow a spacecraft to adjust its flight path en route. She believes her novel single-step method of repeated orbit refinement could work with essentially autonomous spacecraft, and may be a practical step forward in space exploration.

Many of the other finalists and top prizes also went to computational projects, including Yale Fan
who:

...demonstrated the power of quantum computing in solving challenging "NP-complete" (NPC) problems. His work may offer scientists another tool for exploring theoretical physics.

Thomas Friedman's take on attending the awards dinner was that legal immigration should be encouraged:

America's Real Dream Team

Cloe Fan's Arduino Mario

Chloe Fan programmed an Arduino board to control an 8x8 display that plays a simplified Mario scrolling game, with a second Arduino board to play suitable music, transcribed from sheet music. The video below is Cloe's concise demo, and PC Mag wrote up a good general description: Mario Goes Open-Source with Arduino.

Super Mario Bros on an 8x8 LED matrix from Chloe Fan on Vimeo.

Tic Tac Toe mod

A modification of trivia's tic tac toe Scratch program that can't be beat:

Trivia's Scratch program with scrolling

trivia's incomplete Scratch program, experimenting with scrolling. Use arrow keys to navigate and jump:


My modification that reorganizes the scrolling sprites, and adds a background sprite: