Brainworth is alive!

Last year, I became involved with the small startup Brainworth through a friend who was working with them. Brainworth is a little company that has big goals to reform education. We want to provide quality online teaching resources, at the moment focusing on STEM fields - in particular, programming - but we are building our platform to be as welcoming as possible. You can read more at our website, which says things like this:

Quote:At Brainworth, it is our firm belief that neither education nor recruitment have been able to keep up with technological and cultural change. Entire generations are developing an expectation of rich visuals, instant feedback and personalised experiences and this demand has not been satisfied. There is a huge opportunity to improve both education and recruitment by harnessing the power of games and social networking.

Our actual product is twofold. Brainworth is an online virtual world, a platform for online learning that is designed to allow you to track your education, place it in a social context and set your own learning goals. This is the graph you see in the screenshot below. The second part is the games themselves. We're providing several of our own educational games designed to teach programming (because it's what we know!). They run entirely in-browser.


Eventually, of course, we will open the graph to other developers to plug their games into. We want to be a community-driven source of education, and we expect the graph to grow and change as educators and hobbyists modify curricula and add more content.

So why am I blogging on this? Well, we just released the first playable version of our platform last night. Two and a half years of work by over 50 volunteers have culminated in this, with one more week of full-time sprint where we radically improved the interface and updated and polished our two current educational games. If you're using Chrome in Windows or Mac, you'll be able to login with a Facebook account and experience what we're trying to do!

Play Brainworth

Primitive linux support is planned to be done this week. Until mid-February, we're working on one-week sprints to create the best product we can before we pitch to investors in Silicon Valley. If you do log in and have a poke around, we'd love for you to send us feedback using the appropriate link! And now, I shall answer some pre-emptive questions:

What's your role in this?
In the last week, I've ben the lead interface programmer and server-side programmer. Before that, I helped write the curriculum for the Snakepit game, and assorted programming tasks.

What is Brainworth powered by?
The main graph client is Flash, with HTML interface elements. The games themselves are pure HTML5, with a variety of technology like jsrepl for in-browser programming and AngularJS for the UI interaction.

Why games?
Games are engaging! There are free online courses, many of high quality created by leading universities, that have 4/5th of their students drop out. We want to provide a more engaging experience. as our CEO likes to say, we want to get people addicted to learning.

Why Facebook
In the screenshot above you'll notice some little dots flying around the islands. Those represent the progress my Facebook friends have made in the graph (completed blue islands, and ready-to-play green islands). We're big on social integration - it's an essential part of education! Competitive and cooperative behavior requires you to have a social context.

What's the plan for this week?

• Linux support (but still Chrome only)
• Developer tools to create your own islands
• More levels!
• Video tutorials for programming in Python (the Snakepit game)
• View your and others' profiles

It's been a wild ride so far, and it's going to keep being one. But boy will it be worth it!