Small Projects
We’ve worked on many interesting projects since our founding in 1994 and we’ve worn many hats over the years. Beyond technical skills, we strive for excellence in our work, we meet deadlines, we’re detail-oriented, we're forthright, we work hard, and we love to make our clients look good.
Below are a few projects which posed particularly interesting challenges.
Case Study: The “Field Trips” Series
Commercially released in 1990, “A Field Trip into the Sea” and “A Field Trip into the Rainforest” are the progenitors of a whole genre of children’s educational software. Since then, hundreds of titles have been released based on this concept. Using a hypergraphic database approach—which we believe to be the first of its kind—kids are invited to explore the flora and fauna of different ecosystems and make connections between the living things found there. The Field Trip series has been a substantial hit for Sunburst Communications, winning numerous awards. Since its release, it has been continually updated and is still a big seller.
Olga Werby’s lush illustrations pushed the primitive 1-bit display technology of the time—only capable of rendering either solid black or pure white pixels.
Case Study: Knowledge Universe
Knowledge Universe embarked on an ambitious project to deliver online educational content tailored to the learning styles of each student. They needed to be able to serve, in a browser, a large collection of non-customized content derived from a variety of other sources. But they needed to provide consistent navigation options and branding. Pipsqueak designed an interface for this project which, in part, floats over the pages of educational content and allows students to easily annotate the page or navigate the system.
Case Study: Spectrum Light Box
Chabot Space and Science Center asked Pipsqueak to design a kid-friendly spectrum and light box station. It was located in a corner alcove between two sun-lit windows. Pipsqueak designed a multi-station activity cube with light table, built-in telescope, and an embedded hood with both laser and white light sources being modified by a prism. We also created a similarly themed mural for the adjacent wall panel, and a color sculpture which has hidden messages which become clear when viewed through colored filters. All design projects have constraints. The particular issues of usability by a young audience, ruggedness, safety, and size made this an interesting design challenge.
Case Study: Dinosauria
Dinosauria is a mathematical logic game developed for middle school students. A set of environment cards are shuffled and dealt out into a grid. Then players try to place dinosaur pieces onto the grid, following the logic table “rules” for each dinosaur and grid square. For example, an environment grid piece might say “only one carnivore on this space” while a dinosaur rule might be “needs to be no more than only one space from water.” Each dinosaur has several rules associated with it, and complexity points—the more complex the set of rules for placing a particular dinosaur, the more points it’s worth. Each time a dinosaur is placed into Dinosauria, the game becomes more complex—the set of potentially conflicting rules increases. In order to place a large number of dinosaurs, the player needs to use strategy—is it better to place lots of little plant-eating dinosaurs or one big meat-eater? Variations allow for user manipulation of the environmental grid as well. While fun to play, Dinosauria is specifically designed to teach the standard logical operators (And, Or, Not), introductory set theory, and logical thinking skills.
Case Study: Patterns of Nature
This project was created to accompany a set of wonderful exhibits by Ned Kahn demonstrating natural forces. A particular challenge was creating educational materials which could be used by kids from 6 through 18 years of age. The solution included a large set of photo cards for all ages together with different sets of grade-specific instruction sheets each featuring age appropriate card activities designed to use the photo cards.
