Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 324

Vidcode is a programming tool geared toward teenage girls

With the technology industry considered male-dominated, many have wondered how to encourage more women into coding. Alexandra Diracles and Melissa Halfon have an idea: change the language.

The result is Vidcode, interactive software geared toward teenage girls that enables them to customise Instagram videos with effects that they program. By combining programming with a hobby that their target demographic is already familiar with, Diracles and Halfon aim to combat a perception among girls that tech and coding are “boring.” Students can also share the videos with their friends, adding a social aspect to the coding.

“A lot of young girls are interested in fun, artsy stuff like Instagram and Vine, but right now, all they see is the end product, not the code under the hood,” Diracles said in an interview with Startup Weekend EDU NYC, a competition they won earlier this year. “I learned to code just recently—while in grad school—and I don’t want girls growing up today to wait so long to see how fun coding is.”

Vidcode primarily deals with the languages of JavaScript and HTML5; it teaches JavaScript by creating video filters and uses JavaScript libraries and HTML5 to control how the videos look. Moving into more advanced animated effects will provide further lessons in JavaScript. Their current objective is to distribute the completed software to schools in the spring of 2015 as either a standalone JavaScript teaching tool or as a supplement to an existing curriculum.

The software is currently in beta and is free to try for the public until the end of October. You can also find it on Kickstarter.

Make sure you lose in "anti-racing" game Boxcar Brats

Triumph! At last. 

This mountain hut is like a crash-landed spaceship

Part LEGO and part crash-landed Borg cube, Atelier 8000’s entry into the Kežmarská Chata (Kežmarská Hut) international architectural competition would have looked right at home in the High Tatras peaks of Slovakia.

The design team said that the “clean simple cube shape” is intended to evoke a scene of an ice block that was left behind randomly by a retreating glacier. The glass combined with photovoltaic and aluminium panels that cover the surface of the proposal replicate the glare and reflections of the ice and snow-capped peaks surrounding it, while the “sharp edges” blend in with the landscape.

The cuboid shape and the design of the exterior also optimize the building’s ability to capture solar energy and minimise its carbon footprint. Given its location—that is, the middle of nowhere—the building had to be able to operate off-the-grid.

The Kežmarská mountain huts, which age back to 1922 as strategic mountain huts for the Czechoslovakian military, began attracting tourists in the area as they provided a safe shelter for Alpine explorers. The competition was intended to provide a modern alternative to that aging Alpine infrastructure. Entries had to accommodate weary travelers with a restaurant, beds and bathrooms, skiing storage, a medical facility and a snowmobile garage. Atelier 8000’s entry did not place, but it is in fact awesome.

Photos: © Jan Cyrany, Courtesy of Atelier 8000

Source: Dezeen

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Should all videogames be free?

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Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel takes aim on itself

If on a moon's surface a vault hunter ...

A videogame in which you do nothing by a designer who may not exist

We're still waiting. 

Some rich, handsome couple is going to get lost and starve to death in this "labyrinthine" mansion

There's a house down the street from me that doesn't make sense. I live in a totally normal neighborhood in Chicago—lotta old Ukrainian people, plus a bar with tattooed dudes who like hockey—but someone just uprooted a full corner and plopped this enormous obsidian mansion in the middle of it. The weird thing is, it looks great; I don't think anyone minds its meticulously tended little stone gardens and tastefully tinted windows. The other day I saw the dude who lives there emerge to take out his trash, and it was as God decreed: tailored, soft-purple button-up, gray slacks, dense but well-manicured stubble. I'm sure his name was Darren and he occasionally "throws on" one of his old Yo La Tengo t-shirts. 

I imagine that Darren also lives in this Norwegian palace, by architects Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk AS Arkitektkontor. Dubbed "Concrete House" by its creators, it's an intentionally labyrinthine creation: "The kind where children can explore the many staircases, rooms and hallways, and where there is enough space for teeming life to unfold." It's dense, full of shapes and cantilevered platforms and corners upon corners. Which sounds all well and good when you and your handsome dinner guests are peering at each other across this epic expanse:

But wait: what's up this stairway? That expanse of daylight up there couldn't hide anything menacing. Let's give it a look.

And then you're in this glass bathroom and you can't tell if you're inside or outside of it, or why your reflection is suddenly slightly handsomer than you remember yourself being. But heavens, what a sky! You could stay here forever, you tell yourself. 

Eventually you step on a veranda, trying to figure out a way back down. The stairway you came up now heads straight into an underground swimming pool. And where did everyone go? Who is that in the window far away? When did your put on a soft-purple button-up?

Days later, you jump for it. You've seen too much—too little, perhaps. As you sprint over the foothills, desperate to talk to a human that you're sure is actually there, you take one last look back and see—what is that? The soft-purple shirt, the perfect stubble, but your eyes—it's you, staring out of every window, barely moving but alive. You see a second you emerge in the bottom window alone—just for a moment, and then the sun glimmers on the perfect glass, and it's gone. 

h/t to Dezeen

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Console cowboys welcome.

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Here's one space war you can't win.