Jesse Pickard

Show & Tell winners! (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:43:27 -0500

Show & Tell winners! (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

Your design is good but does it do good? (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:16:26 -0500

Your design is good but does it do good? (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

Can’t wait to set this guy loose on the world. (at...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:58:34 -0500

Can’t wait to set this guy loose on the world. (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

New prizes!! (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 21:53:13 -0500

New prizes!! (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

Oh, the things you’ll find in the MindSnacks supply...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:55:07 -0500

Oh, the things you’ll find in the MindSnacks supply closet…

Me and @babsdraws checking out some of @tinysnails wonderful art...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:24:59 -0500

Me and @babsdraws checking out some of @tinysnails wonderful art for a new geography game. So excited. (at MindSnacks HQ v2)

mindsnacks: Love learning with MindSnacks? Nominate us for Best...

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:39:52 -0500

mindsnacks:

Love learning with MindSnacks? Nominate us for Best Education Startup!

The 2012 Crunchies, awards given out by TechCrunch, are upon us and they’ve added a brand-spankin-new category that we think we’d be just *perfect* for—Best Education Startup! We’re willing to give major high fives to anyone and everyone that has it in their heart to nominate us for this most prestigious award. Those nominated are eligible to actually receive the award, so this is a crucial first step!

Feel like getting your nomination on?

Nominate MindSnacks here: http://bit.ly/QK72rc

The nomination period goes until Dec 6, and you can vote once a day, every day until the deadline. So set those reminders and feel free to vote vote vote away until then!

Thanks for your support and look out for more updates from us as the nominations close!

mindsnacks: We’re working on making our visual content library...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:29:36 -0400

mindsnacks:

We’re working on making our visual content library more exciting. We’re excited to show you more soon.

mindsnacks: Introducing SAT Vocab by MindSnacks! We’re...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:43:22 -0500

mindsnacks:

Introducing SAT Vocab by MindSnacks!

We’re thrilled to introduce a new subject to our family of apps. Enjoy a brand new game that teaches antonyms, plus all the other good stuff we know you love.

Download it for free from the App Store now!

mindsnacks: The making of Galactic For our Mandarin Chinese...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:05:56 -0500

mindsnacks:

The making of Galactic

For our Mandarin Chinese app, we created a game called Galactic to teach the challenging topic of tones. In Mandarin, a word can take on an entirely different meaning depending on the tone that is used. For example, mā with a high level tone means mother, but mǎ with a falling rising tone means horse. Needless to say, not knowing your tones can lead to plenty of (possibly comical) miscommunication, so we decided to tackle it head-on by creating a new game. Here’s the story about how we built it:

Figuring out our approach

We started by interviewing oodles of Mandarin language learners. As we quizzed them on their knowledge of tones, we repeatedly saw them aiding themselves by waving their fingers in the air in the direction of the tones (swipe up for rising tone, swipe down for falling tone, etc.). It was a lightbulb moment for the team. We knew right then that a gesture-based game was the perfect way to piggyback off of the kinetic learning aid that we were witnessing in our interviews.

Paper Prototyping

Before throwing hours into a digital prototype, we kicked around concepts on paper. This allowed us to explore as many options as we liked very quickly, while being critical about what worked and what didn’t.

Rough wireframing

After validating as many assumptions as possible using paper prototypes, we zeroed in on the feature set of the game by producing rough wireframes of potential concepts. Our tools of choice are Omnigraffle for wireframing and LiveView for making sure our designs feel right on small mobile devices.

Thematic Exploration

Once we worked out the functionality, it needed to be wrapped into a theme/metaphor.

Galactic went through a few thematic development revisions. It originally lived as a game about samurais and sword swipes. While the idea seemed great on paper, we soon realized that it didn’t fit with the vibe of our other mini games.

We wanted to capture the ideas of exploration and progression. We ended up setting the game in outer space, embracing the notion of interplanetary discovery as our metaphor. Space naturally encompasses the concepts of travel and exploration, and using space as our setting brought a sort of mystique to the game that was easy and exciting to build on.

The biggest challenge was working out how to take the vast coldness of space and humanize it. Planets and constellations became characters for a player to be rewarded with as they progressed through the levels.

Iteration Iteration Iteration

After the guts were fleshed out enough, we worked on tuning the interface and interactions.

Galactic went through a few early interaction struggles. In teaching the tones with shape-based associations, we got stuck when creating a gesture-recognition interaction. It proved both hard to tune and a little complicated for a player to digest in the midst of trying to learn. We ended up simplifying the shape-creating method so as to remove player frustration; this resulted in a more responsive game.

In addition to conducting internal testing, we relentlessly playtested our games with neutral outsiders to get feedback on user experience. Galactic’s shape-capturing mechanism benefited from thorough testing and feedback-driven iteration. We continue to tune our product as it exists, live in the App Store.

Galactic is just the start of a bunch of new games we’re releasing. You can play it by downloading MindSnacks Mandarin for free. We hope you enjoy it!

mindsnacks: Introducing MindSnacks German! We’re excited...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:18:28 -0500

mindsnacks:

Introducing MindSnacks German!

We’re excited to add another language to our subject library.

(a special shout out to you good folks who voted to build this treat.)

Download it for free from the App Store now!

mindsnacks: This is Jarod writing 100000000000 lines of code to...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:12:35 -0500

mindsnacks:

This is Jarod writing 100000000000 lines of code to make a magical delight, which will be coming to the app store soon. We’re very excited about it.

You want to know what now?

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:40:14 -0500

mindsnacks:

If you could play a game that taught you a new language, skill, or topic, what would you want to learn? Go ahead, get all crazy with your answers….

Zuck on games

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:26:00 -0500

Love the way Zuck responds to Charlie Rose’s questions.

Zuckerberg: Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga (which are going public soon and will be valued most likely at multibillion dollar valuations, and basically all of their games are built on top of Facebook for the most part) And a huge number of other companies as well.

So I mean, does Facebook build any games? No. We build no games.

Rose: You say that today –

Zuckerberg: No, we —

Rose: You say that today –

Zuckerberg: No, I’m pretty sure we’re not going to build any games.

Rose: I’m only saying this because people thought that Steve Jobs would never go into retail, and he did.

Zuckerberg: I’ll tell you why. Because building games is really hard. And what we’re doing is really hard. And we think that we’re better off focusing on this piece. I think that building a great game service is really hard. Building a great music service is really hard. Building a great movie service is really hard. And we just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company which is why we think that the strategy of these other companies trying to do everything themselves will inevitably be less successful than an ecosystem where you have someone like Facebook trying to build the core product to help people connect and then independent great companies that are only focused on one or two things doing those things really well.

I’ve never lost a hero before, so I’m not quite sure how to handle yesterday’s...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:51:26 -0400

I’ve never lost a hero before, so I’m not quite sure how to handle yesterday’s news. All I know is that aside from my parents, Steve Jobs was the single biggest force behind me becoming an entrepreneur.

My life has changed completely since taking the leap into entrepreneurship. Simply put, I’ve never been happier. I can’t imagine enduring a single day where I’m not working on building awesome things alongside brilliant, passionate people. As Steve puts it, “I want to put a ding in the universe” and there’s nothing that’s going to stop me until that happens.

I’m extremely lucky to have found something I love doing and it just feels right to thank the guy that helped me get to this point.

Thanks for everything, Steve.

mindsnacks: Check out how our awesome game characters come to...

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:08:44 -0400

mindsnacks:

Check out how our awesome game characters come to life!

psql:

Made this for the ones asking how I draw fish.

mindsnacks: The spoils of our Team Piñata hunt.

Fri, 20 May 2011 22:45:43 -0400

mindsnacks:

The spoils of our Team Piñata hunt.

mindsnacks: 1st Annual MindSnacks Piñata Hunt!

Fri, 20 May 2011 22:45:11 -0400

mindsnacks:

1st Annual MindSnacks Piñata Hunt!

mindsnacks: Ray & Mike from Simplenote hung out at our...

Fri, 13 May 2011 20:24:00 -0400

mindsnacks:

Ray & Mike from Simplenote hung out at our studio acrobatically!

mindsnacks: jarodl: Next month I am making the move to San...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:13:41 -0400

mindsnacks:

jarodl:

Next month I am making the move to San Francisco to join MindSnacks as a Software Engineer! They are a great group of people working on fun games that fool you into learning. I’m going to miss all of my friends and family back home but it shouldn’t be hard to convince them to visit California.

I have always had a strong passion for art, design and programming; all of which are required (among many other things) to make a great game. Add the learning aspect to what MindSnacks does and I don’t think I could ask for a better idea to work on.

A large welcome to Jarod - who’s now officially joined our league of magical Intelligentlemen as an engineer. We are really excited to have him on board, and can’t wait to have him build all sorts of treats with us!