Thanks again to the Caktus Consulting Group, Carrboro Creative Coworking, MetaMetrics, Capstrat, Karen, and everyone who showed up to make the event happen.

I managed to be perfectly eclipsed in this picture…

We are organizing a Django sprint here in the Triangle on December 12th and 13th 2009 (Saturday & Sunday). The sprint is being hosted by Caktus Consulting Group over at Carrboro Creative Coworking.

The goal is to get folks familiar with the Django development process and knock out some features and tickets associated with the upcoming release of Django 1.2.

You can find more details on the Sprint Wiki: http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/Sprint200912TriangleNC

Sign Up Here…

Sponsors

Thanks to Caktus Consulting Group, Carrboro Creative Coworking, and MetaMetrics for helping sponsor this event.

Hope to see you there!

Django’s growing popularity

First off, it’s important to note that Django adoption is growing nationwide. The included chart shows the number of posted “Django” jobs found on Indeed.com over the past few years. Notice a trend? Jacob Kaplan-Moss estimates the Django community may have grown somewhere on the order of 2-3x from 2007 to 2009. I definitely believe it and wouldn’t be surprised if it were higher. Between the volume of phone calls from recruiters and the number of people I run into using or talking about Django its popularity is definitely on the rise in the Triangle.

Django in Action

Here’s a short list of shops in the Triangle who use Django in their day-to-day development:

• MetaMetrics ( Lexile )
• Caktus Consulting Group
• Capstrat
• American Research Institute
• Semiconductor Research Corporation
• Viget Labs
• rPath

I know there are other closeted folks out there using Django without full corporate blessing or knowledge. If there are other groups out there who would like to make this list please let me know.

A Triangle Django Users Group?

A new Google Group TriDjUG (twitter: @TriDjUG) was recently created in order to help foster a healthy Django community. At the same time some good discussion erupted from the TriZPUG mailing list. Why bother splitting our local Python community? While the intention was never to split away, some good cases were made for operating under the umbrella of TriZPUG. Strengthen the Python community. One exciting sentiment that came from TriZPUG members was that non-Django Python users were interested in Django and wanted to learn more during regular TriZPUG meetings. That would give us a captive audience at an already catered and organized event. Sounds good.

Surely there is some Django-specific fun to be had… For starters, we’re looking to sponsor local Django-related sprints maybe including one for the upcoming Django 1.2 release. For our community building/growing merit badges a couple of us are developing a Django Bootcamp; let’s continue to grow.

So it sounds like it’s up to us local Djangonauts to step up, participate in TriZPUG, and build greater awareness. People want to hear about our technologies, so let’s share. If you have other ideas we’ld love to hear them. If you haven’t yet introduced yourself swing by the mailing list or irc (#trizpug) and say hello.

Protosprout ( http://protosprout.com ) is a NC-based company founded by Justis Peters that is looking to bring local entrepreneurs together and foster an energized, start-up community. I think it was a successful first meeting. Justis pulled folks together and lead some interesting and informal discussions including how the community could work together to provide support and value to one another. Ideas included things like skill and service bartering, community forums, general networking, official Protosprout mentorship and startup programs. A local skill bartering system would be great for a lot of startups ( ala programmer meets designer ) as would a tighter knit community for bouncing ideas off of or even testing your prototypes.

Part of the evening included time for pitching your startups and Q&A. Even Wayne Sutton got up and pitched an idea. I’ll take a moment to mention one really cool company that pitched: Durham TechShop ( http://www.durham.techshop.ws )

The TechShop will be a a DIY workshop with a slew of tools and machines for any number of tasks ( electronics, woodworking, plastics, machining, welding, 3d printing, even blacksmithing! ). They’ll offer classes so that you can get certified to use the various tools and then you’re off to create whatever you want. I am really excited to see this in action, so all you folks with checkbooks contact Scott Saxon over at the TechShop and get this puppy funded!

I met a lot of interesting people that night and look forward to attending the next Protosprout meeting. You should check it out over at http://protosprout.com . I think Justis is doing a great job getting this organized.

You can also follow Protosprout on Twitter  ( http://twitter.com/protosprout )

Something Big is a Brewing

I think NC ALTA has really started a powerful ball rolling by creating a common focus on which a number of industries and research disciplines are beginning to converge. To demonstrate this let me list areas represented by the some of the people I encountered at the conference:

• Game engine developers
• Serious game developers
• Developers of virtual worlds including frameworks like Second Life or Croquet. This also includes the corporate facet aimed at facilitating remote work and collaboration via a virtualized workplace.
• Researchers dealing with immersive visualizations and virtual experiences. This includes some of the cool immersive environments hosted by RENCI.
• Second (or third?) generation of e-learning companies and their interest in assessment, monitoring, and integration into larger learning management systems.
• Educators interested in getting these technologies out in the schools and in the hands of students. As well as educators interested in seeing proper learning theory incorporated into program design.

Now imagine the intersection of all (or some) of these groups.

Parallel Tinkering and Research

I attended one birds-of-a-feather discussion that dealt with educational games and simulations in higher ed. I was surprised at the number of professors and students who have already begun building, deploying, and testing their educational games within their universities. Some folks met up after the round table and shared war stories, common hang-ups, and I think even identified some future collaborations. Exciting stuff!

One thing that came up a number of times during that session was the fact that we did have a number of independent development efforts going on. Essentially, each project required the development of a slew of management frameworks, authentication, integration with LMSs, middleware, etc. Everyone needed these same components and so everyone wrote their own.

Libby Evans of UNC and several others identified the need for some common, modular solutions to these problems. Establishing a framework of common solutions would allow researchers to focus on the interesting problems and it would encourage compatibility and collaboration. So it seems like a nice next step would be to look at the number of developed solutions and start distilling out some design patterns.

The Efficacy of Games in Education

Do games actually work in education? can they be used as a tool to teach or explore? I am particularly interested in this topic and have begun looking at this in terms of math games. Marrilea Mayo of the Kauffman Foundation was kind enough to share a tremendous amount of her own findings from reviewing the disparate literature.

Many of us have heard a number of positive anecdotal (or underpowered, small n) successes, positive pilots, but few full-blown psychometric studies on the efficacy of games in learning. In fact, I have not found any commercially available shrink-wrapped math games with associated efficacy studies. I have seen products claiming they are “scientifically-based”, because the product is designed around a number of accepted practices not that their actual efficacies were tested.

While I have personally been focused on the efficacy in K-12 and higher ed, there were also a number of discussions dealing with the same concepts in corporate space. How do we measure the success of our corporate training programs? ROI? So, it seems like efficacy and the ability to measure and monitor success is a common theme and something we need to start incorporating into our designs. Luckily, I think this is solvable once we begin embedding the means to track psychometrically-valid metrics.

So, I walked away from the ALT Summit pretty excited that we had begun a conversation that I think will develop into something revolutionary down the road. I encourage you to keep tuned in and check out NC ALTA.

The Digital Game Expo (DGXPO) is a local game development conference hosted by Wake Tech. This is not a massive industry conference with a convention center filled with vendors and game dev shops passing out tsatskes. One of DGXPO’s goals is to give aspiring developers and developers from other industries a peek into the game industry.

Registration for the expo just opened this week over at http://www.dgxpo.com . It doesn’t look like the sessions are posted yet, but there is a list of speakers.

Student Work

The conference is hosted by Wake Tech and their game development and simulation program. This gives Wake Tech’s students a chance to show off their handiwork. Last year, students from Wake Tech (and I believe a couple other schools) had a room setup with playable demos of games they had worked on for a variety of platforms. Of course right next to all their class projects, the local Virtual Heroes had a popular demo of America’s Army running complete with realistic training rifle.

Industry

Last year I briefly spoke with Robert Rice from Neogence Studios about his new MMO Immortal Destiny. He couldn’t go into too much detail at that time, but his take on the role of social dynamics and AI sounded like it will be a refreshing twist on the state of MMOs. This year he is going to be a speaker at the Expo. I’m looking forward to his session and any sneak peeks we might get.

I intend to register again this year and see what others in the area are up to.