Playing pong with your minds
As you have noticed, rendezvousPong has an option to challenge the players with simple math questions as a means to gain advantage over the opponent. We believe that for some this will be a playful way to learn the multiplication table. For others, (mainly grownups with nothing better to do) it can be used to exert your superiority not only in hand coordination but also in mental acumen over your unsuspecting friend.
We are aware that math drills of the type as offered here tend to be frowned upon by high minded educators.
We would very much like to provide deeper and profound questions, but we observe that most players are just too busy following the ball to ponder on anything bigger.
From our own experiences, we also note that it does not hurt at all to have proficiency in quick quantitative reasoning. It is true both in daily activities and in the frontiers of scientific research.
We will not claim that rendezvousPong is an educational program per se. It is a simple, mindless fun game which happens to help you burn some excess fat on your brain on the side, if you choose to.
More seriously, playing pong with your minds
Just in case you begin to feel silly to spend time batting harmless ball across the network with colleagues with phD's, let us introduce you to iStorm, the other pong program we developed.
The simple idea behind iStorm is to exchange ideas just as easily as grabbing the paddle to hit the ball. Of course, you have emails, cell-phones, video-conferences, and other wonders of our digital era ready to facilitate a collaboration.
iStorm and its sister program iChalk concentrate on providing the intimate space for creative collaboration where inspirations bounce off one another, constantly trasmuting itself into something unexpected. Often, email communication with its time lag is not just fast enough to keep the members intoxicated in the fleeting inspirations. On the other hand, video conferencing often weighs too heavy on us with its overhead and difficulty of use. How many times have you felt oppressed in a video conference where everything but the toilet flushing went wrong?
iStorm features various ways to share and create original ideas without hassle. It provides a shared chalk board for images, an inline calulator and TeX equation generator as well as voice enabled chatting.
iStorm 3.0 under Panther even offers a synchronized viewing of pdf files and shared annotation.
Just imagine: The pong ball now becomes a carrier of ideas, comments, equations, and images.
K12 students, teachers, engineers, scientists, writers, and poets can all use iStorm to do what they do best.
Of course, none of these will beat the short trip to your colleague's office with a coffee mug in hand! But why don't you this new and fun way of collaboration a try?
