Entries this day: dream-live-video-game ego-non-in-urbe-studet-sed-domi-studet

dream live video game

My first day working at a new language School the students were read some ground rules before each lesson which included that they had to try their best and could hold the teachers accountable for things they said. This framework allowed us to have a deeper experience and allowed us to explore outside via a giant video game that started with four possible physical levels to choose from on level one.

We started in the outdoor level and were traveling along railroad tracks as different characters including a model of the Earth made from an aluminum ball and a cube character that could float. There were some non-player characters that would populate the game and make it more interesting and there were even some ways that the characters could be flattened which did not allow them to roll but did allow them to access other parts of the game that a 3D character could not access.

The rails of the railroad tracks were not designed specifically for trains but designed to allow freestyle travel to different areas. the student who was playing the round earth character was not worried when his character got flattened. I was worried at first but the game allowed him to keep moving along the railroad tracks and to slowly convert back into a 3D shape. At around 2 hours of game time we came across a feature that allowed travel in a different dimension including an airport which would allow flying and the airport terminal which would allow travel on a perpendicular access to the railroad tracks.

It was around this point that the lesson was over and we took stock of the real world costs of playing a video game for 2 hours, asking questions like what else could we have done and would it have been more effective to do something else.

ego non in urbe studet sed domi studet

I've been studying Japanese and Latin via DuoLingo. I hope the title of this entry means "I do not study in the city but I study at home" in Latin.

I discovered something interesting about studying.. if I study Duolingo or KUMON separately, they get annoying pretty quickly. But studying them at the same time(*) makes them both more tolerable.

(*) Study one for 2-3 minutes then swap to the other; repeat.

I just now spent about an hour and a half studying with the mix and match technique. But if I do them separately I make it about 15 minutes before I get tired and quit.