Breaking the Rules (of Business)
This year I'm relaunching goodlearning.com with a narrower focus. Goodlearning users will focus their creative learning around specific beginning-to-end game projects. Every project begins with the game concept, requirements, and other design considerations. Then each project ends with a completed project -- with each users' personal flair to boot.
What about breaking the rules?
Most folks tell you businesses should be designed to:
- Scale: the business can handle a large amount of new activity while adding only a small amount of new expenses / resources.
- Run Without You: the business should be able to run with or without you, the founder.
Why break the rules?
I totally understand scale and "working on your business, not in it." However, Goodlearning.com is something I want to do more than anything else. At this point, I want to provide nearly individual attention to each student as I can.
This morning, as I considered what game mechanics the site should use to encourage users to keep moving forward, I decided I want to "validate" certain steps students take. At different milestones during game projects, students can upload the work they did for a lesson (a starship sprite, for instance) and I'll "validate" that item. This gives them additional points specific to validated exercises. It also gives me a chance to keep on board with each student's learning. I won't be grading their work, per se, but if I see they are not on the right track I can offer some assistance.
Completely bonkers
So, if I get 1,000 students -- a goal for 2012 -- and only half of them submit items for validation -- I'm going to be one busy beaver! I am considering options for allowing more senior students to do validation, but that's thinking way too far ahead.
Level up your creative technical skills
Anyway, if you want to learn creative technical skills while having a great time, keep your eyes on goodlearning.com. I'll try launching a kickstarter.com project soon to get some funding I need, and after that you can sign up and get moving.
Happy New Year 2012
Happy New Year to everyone!
New Year's Eve is also my wife Leigh's birthday. We had some folks over for a little get together, and it was great. A guest's snickerdoodles were the most scrumptious, but I think Leigh's blintzes and my meatballs were winners, too.
I learned to play "Magic: The Gathering" (the card game) and was left with a deck so I can play with Leigh, who also got a vampire-themed deck for her birthday.
That's all I have to say about that!