Learning through Remixing

On Wednesday, we released a new version of Looking Glass which, for the first time, includes support for pre-fab remixes. (I could see that term changing over time but it's the phrase we've been using internally). Using prefab remixes is easy: 1) click on remix, 2) select an appealing looking animation from the prefab remixes tab, 3) press the "Remix" button and 4) choose a character in your world to perform the remixed animation or choose to add the one used in the original remix. One of the original motivations for starting to incorporate the ability to remix was to provide a way for users of the system to figure out how to do new things. The way we currently see that playing out begins with a prefab remix. In essence, we hope that the prefab remixes will serve as a catalyst to dig deeper. Evelyn adds the huff and puff remix for the big bad wolf to her world. This adds an animation that has the big bad wolf take a deep breath and blow. Evelyn sees this and decides something should happen when the big bad wolf blows. In fact, maybe the wolf has allergies and sneezes and then blows someone away. There's a girl standing nearby in the world. Evelyn wants to have the wolf's sneeze blow the girl away. As a first step, Evelyn adds an action that moves the girl away from the wolf and out of the view of the camera to the end. But, when she watches her program run, she realizes that if the move away happens after huff and puff, the wolf has already stood back up. The blow part is long since over. She needs to figure out where to put her move away action so it will occur in response to the Big Bad Wolf's blow. To do this, Evelyn watches her world using Play & Explore. Play & Explore records the behavior of the program so that Evelyn can scroll back in time, look at what actions were happening at any point, and click on those actions to see what they did. Using Play & Explore, Evelyn can scroll back in time to figure out where in the program the Big Bad Wolf begins to blow. She finds that the wolf leans forwards in a doTogether that turns several parts of his body and then during the blow part his head moves back and forth a little using a count loop. Evelyn has discovered do togethers, but she hasn't animated a body part and has never used a loop. She notes these as things she might want to experiment with later. To get the behavior she wants, Evelyn adds a dotogether and has her character move away from the big bad wolf at the same time as the wolf shakes his head. In essence, the prefab remixes provide a (hopefully) large source of examples of how to do actions that users can easily apply to their own characters. Then, using Play & Explore they can start to understand what those actions do and modify them for their own stories. Through exploring code that contains things a given user doesn't know how to do, Looking Glass creates the potential for users to discover new functionality they want to master. In one early study that used a full remix process where users captured and then integrated code from other worlds, we saw evidence of exactly this. About three quarters of the users developed new skills through exploring actions they remixed.