Found in London â€“ RAG app

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate.

So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity.

It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure…

The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an activity. The “AS” is the way in which a person must try to present it. So you simply shake the iPhone, and you get an assignment like:

“Do the twelve times table as a rhyming couplet”

The green arrow offers a web link to more information on either side of the “Do/As” line- links to WikiPedia for reference or YouTube videos to demonstrate a process.

Maybe that would go…

Twelve times one is an easy one on the shelf
It’s 12 Since anything times one is itself.

If you do twelve times two it’s a simple chore
As doing this one gets you twenty four

Or another shake gets you…

I will leave this one as an exercise to the reader 😉

Technically its a really simple app. But I like it because

it leads to being creative.
It is a technology tool that sets up an activity that is not done in technology. The app gives you something to do, but it is not done in the app. So you might have to act it out in front of a group, or maybe you would build the act in say a pecha kucha form, or something else.
It is inherently social- you would do the activity in front of other people.
The format lends itself to further research- if you do not fully know the “do” or the “act” (I had to look up rhyming couplet to be sure), it calls for further inquiry.

It’s a great recipe. The web site has a great set of video examples of how people have “done the RAG” http://theragis.us/