Author Archives: Warren Blyth

About Warren Blyth

Education games/media designer for Oregon State University's Extended Campus Program Development & Training team

Exercise: M&M&Ms (A Math Refresher)

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Here is a simple tool we created from scratch, which points out the mean, median, and mode values from a randomly generated set of data:

Screenshot of Soc315 simple statistics refresher tool

Background:
The instructor noted that students are required to have taken a basic statistics course before starting his Sociology class, but they have often forgotten how to apply the concepts of mean, median and mode to a data set. He asked if we could create a tool that would show these values applied to a data set that the students might actually encounter during their sociology studies. Continue reading →

Whale Migration

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Project Name: Whale Migration
Media: Flash Vector Drawings
Class: FW302
Design Team: Warren Blyth, Thomas Emery

This interactive flash application lets you follow the migration of gray whales off the west coast of North America for 2 years. It follows a pregnant mother, calf, and a male. Numbers came from OSU researchers.

This project was directed by Warren Blyth, programming by Thomas Emery, I was in charge of animation, art, and layout.

Click the image to launch the application. Hit the play button in the bottom left corner to start it.

Sperm Whale Animation Tests (Maya)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGnBN2VTlNI

We worked with some Fisheries & Wildlife instructors last year to develop a sperm whale dive simulation in Flash. This was designed to bring their data to life, and give students a deeper understanding of what was happening as a sperm whale dove to great depths, hunted food, and resurfaced. This was delivered as a simple 2D animation, with some limited interaction (which I’ll post later, if the instructor approves).

Soon after delivering the 2D version, PDT started experimenting with a 3D version of the dive that was closer to an fully interactive video game. The plan was to make this game using Unity3D instead of Flash. At the time, we had a student worker, Wes Starr, who was learning to use Autodesk’s Maya (a popular 3D modeling program). The two videos featured in this post are samples that he generated (output from Maya) so we could seek feedback on the whale’s motion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl–nNTt4tA

We are still experimenting with the Unity3D version of this simulation (or game), but since the 2D version works – this notable revision has ended up a low priority project. I thought it would be nice to share these work-in-progress videos. 🙂