Bots as art, games as teaching tools
Have you ever thought of creating Twitter bots that can make art? How about using games as teaching tools? Matteo Menapace is running sessions on both of these topics this afternoon at MozFest.
His first session is called “Making bots that make art” and is at 2pm in the Digital Arts & Culture space, room 102. Matteo enjoys playing around with Twitter, making bots that generate art and poetry. One of Matteo’s bots, @somewherebot, takes images from Google Street View from all over the world using its api. The bot finds images which include people and then tweets the images with comments on the weather, such as “you are arid” or “you are hot”. The bot is featured in the MozEx installation on the 7th floor.
In the session, Matteo will show just how easy it is to create bots using Twitter’s api, including techniques that deal with authentication and setting the bot’s parameters.
His second session is called “Hacking games to teach Web Literacy” and is in the Demystify the Web space, room 702 at 4.30pm. Matteo has been leading sessions at MozFest and elsewhere for a while, encouraging people to make games as teaching tools. These games require research, an understanding of rules, testing and iterative design — in fact, many things that apply to game design also apply to technology in the same way. Matteo’s session draws on these parallels.
To learn more about Matteo’s work, follow him on Twitter — @baddeo.
