Nikola Solic / Reuters

Four years ago I noted here how board gaming was, with the advent of crowdfunding, undergoing something of a renaissance. Far from being a flash in the pan, this renaissance has continued, building on its successes and iterating ideas and cultures – and technology is at the centre of this meeple-powered movement.

As a digital game developer there might be a perception that what we do is all about the technology, that we’re always on to the new and shiny “next big thing”. And in part, yes, our industry is driven by changes in technology and they do constantly alter the landscape into which we release titles. So the antithesis of this might seem to be the board game: bits of card instead of GPUs, a couple of dice in place of CPUs, and an instructions manual instead of interactive tutorials. Chalk and cheese.

However the reality is quite different. As someone who’s just been part of the team porting a classic and much loved 1977 game Ogre to digital, I’m well aware of the differences – and similarities – of both forms, and there is often much more overlap than you might think…

Low-fi Sci-fi? Ogre covers 1977-1983

Digital Ogre’s Physical gameplay

Video Grew the Gaming Star
Video has disrupted video games. This movement was apparent years ago but the changes have surpassed what many in the industry thought might happen. ‘Let’s Plays’ – a form of YouTube video where players simply played along to the game, recording both the game and the reaction from the people playing it became huge, dominating both gaming and video. Game developers actively court these YouTube stars, as their endorsement of a game can lead to vast numbers of new players. In recent years the live streaming of Let’s Plays – via sites like Twitch – has shifted the movement into one that caters for the ‘now’ of gaming. This is technology squared – a 60 FPS game running live to a watching audience on console or desktop PC while a camera captures the expressions of the player as they battle within the game. The board game equivalent has been just as powerful to its own area, as the popularity of watching groups of people sit around and play games has rocketed. Seemingly old-school games like Dungeons and Dragons have regular live shows that attract thousands of viewers. Rich Keith of UK-based YouTuber’s Yogscast, the first UK group to pass a billion views (yes I said billion!) noted;

“Most of the Yogscast creators grew up on laying board and table top along with video games. For a couple of them that’s how they met and joined the Yogscast. So it was a natural choice to start streaming and making video channels about them. The fact that this coincided with an upswing in popularity has been tremendously useful! Our recent move to a custom built studio means we now have a dedicated board and tabletop studio where we can record with multiple cameras and live stream our games and matches.”

Steaming digital games made from board games (it’s getting very meta!)

The Wisdom of Crowds
Ogre and Munchkin creator Steve Jackson notes how key technology is in keeping the business of getting those low-tech card games into your hands;

“We’re not a computer game company, but we still live by the computer. We use databases to keep track of cards, we use e-mail to keep up with contributors around the world, and we love Kickstarter.”

Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have become much more central in the physical games industry. The logistics of this is very powerful: in your local area there may only be one or two people interested in a deck collecting card game about zombie penguins – globally there may be a few hundred – and that’s enough, if all those people band together to fund that game via a global crowdfunding platform. Then if the resulting project is such fun that even zombie penguin-haters still end up having fun, soon the game is ordered for shops around the globe and a trend is born. Zombie seal, zombie polar bear, and vampire penguin card games mushroom on crowdfunding sites, iterating on the ideas and themes in new directions. It’s all very infectious and exciting.

You Died and Went to Cardboard Heaven
We’ve also seen a huge rise in new board game projects coming from video games, closing this virtuous circle of games influencing one another. There’s a huge number of these: XCOM, Superhot, Plague Inc, and so on (I was going to mention Civilization, but then discovered it started off as a board game, such is its perception as a video game today!). And the quality bar of these new entrants has been good! Sometimes they involve the original creators and other times not – but from the many I’ve seen and played it’s clear that the themes and mechanics of the game are often preserved and well translated. James Vaughn is the creator of the hit digital game Plague Inc and also worked on a physical version. I asked him why?

“Tabletop games are a wonderful way for friends and family to spend time together without digital distractions. Making Plague Inc: The Board Game let me design a game in a whole new way whilst also exposing my game to a lot of friends who never play video games.”

This means the creativity of the digital side is boosting the board game side – the technology advances in a game like Superhot (where time only moves when you do) are spurring new ideas in its card came sibling. Another great example is Dark Souls, the legendarily difficult digital hack-and-slash game (or hack-and-get-slashed, amirite?) which has brilliantly translated its mechanic of boss fights into the digital realm, where in both cases the monstrous boss monster follows a pattern of attacks which you must learn and dance around to kill them and win.

Dark Soul’s board game (Image: Kickstarter)

Future Sounds of Gaming
So where next? It’s not a huge surprise that both sides of this article – digital and physical are eyeing recent development in Augmented Reality – AR – as a further way to join the two sides. The idea of being able to animate your game pieces on your own tabletop is of course a tantalizing idea.

We’ve seen some of this with Skylanders and Disney Infinity, yet as the technology develops there is clearly much more that can be done. We’ve also seen digital companies take punts into physical – the developers of one of the biggest games in the world, League of Legends, recently launched a totally new board game. Plus the movement has gone the other way too, with physical game developers learning from digital too.

All in all our dice-rolling cousins are looking at exciting times and it will be interesting to see what has developed in the medium when I come to write about in another four years time!

The media spotlight tends to shine most brightly on a limited number of high-end smartphones in the mobile industry. It’s easy to understand why; they come from manufacturers who have a significant portion of the global market, and are touted as having the latest ‘must have’ innovations and features.

What we are now beginning to see from the market leaders, are the number of changes to flagship smartphones beginning to gradually decline. The latest iterations are only bringing tweaks in design rather than wholesale changes to the table. This is to be expected as the trend and rate of innovation had to drop off at some point given the time and resources it takes to innovate and create new features.

In time you would expect these ‘flagship’ features to make their way down to the lower end of the market, especially water resistance which was applauded as one of the most innovative features in the high-end phone launches last year. But it is certainly a feature that shouldn’t be the preserve of the top of the range devices. Technologies that add water resistance to smartphones have been around for more than a decade, however they still aren’t the norm, or even available to smartphone users at multiple price points, with a limited number of exceptions.

Great expectations

Consumers though, are now starting to expect a level of water resistance as standard on their mobile phones, partly due to the high-profile launches of devices such as the iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S8. As a result, consumer awareness has increased and started to build momentum so the expectation in mid to lower end of the market is creating a shift in demand. Some level of protection will soon be expected on devices to suit all budgets.

As liquid ingress is one of the most common causes of damage to devices, there is a clear need for this technology in the industry. A study from IDC states that the total number of devices shipped featuring water resistance increased 76% year on year in the first nine months of 2016, compared to the previous year. Water resistance is increasingly sought as an essential feature rather than a ‘nice to have’ for the modern consumer, providing protection against the spills and thrills of everyday life.

Breaking down barriers

There are however, a number of barriers to implementing water resistance technology in mid and lower tier devices:

1) Time; this type of technology takes time to both develop and then get to market, and on average can increase the testing cycle length of a product by 1-2 months and even more if the original design tests fail

2) Cost; mechanical solutions to prevent water ingress such as the seals and gaskets you see on a lot of high end devices are expensive due to the engineering, hardware and design compromises required to implement them

3) Materials; those used to manufacture mid-to-low tier devices do not often suit mechanical solutions such as an ‘O-ring’, which demand high-strength and rigidity. High-end devices usually have strong metal frames whereas lower-tier ones are usually made of more plastic, which are weaker under strain

Manufacturers and consumers both have a shared goal. They want a quality product regardless of price point, that meets the needs of the consumer.

Nanocoating technology offers a non-mechanical solution to the problems faced by both manufacturers and consumers. It protects the whole device, regardless of the materials and manufacturing scenarios used; are increasingly fast to apply and can drive economies of scale in terms of being able to coat high volumes of handsets in a short space of time. This makes it a much more accessible technology to the lower end of the market.

Democratisation as a process

That of internet access on handsets. A decade ago, the market rapidly changed from having few handsets with this capability (beyond very low functionality WAP), such as high-end devices from the likes of Blackberry, to it being ubiquitously available on pretty much every smartphone.

In a similar vein, Motorola has been offering water resistance capabilities on the majority of its handsets since 2011, yet few manufacturers have followed suit. There has been a paradigm shift now though, and I expect to see more manufacturers rolling out water resistance across their range and a rapidly increasing market share of handset devices at multiple price points.

Future-gazing

With an increased reliance on mobile technology, consumers are always on and in touch with the connected world we live in. Now more than ever, it’s never been more important that smartphones are capable of standing up to the rigours of modern day life, and that means that they need to have a level of water resistance. This, coupled with the proliferation of IoT devices, means that water resistance is crucial across a whole spectrum of electronic communications devices.

We’re well on the road to the next generation of mobile networks arriving in the form of 5G, but connectivity at the centre, it is as much about the device as it is the network and one cannot reach its potential without the other. Nanocoating technologies provide innovative and inexpensive options to the mobile industry and can be applied across a range of price points, to bring water resistance to the masses.

We’ve all seen the headlines on school science practicals – they’re too boring, or too predictable, or just not happening often enough.

But when new research comes along, with evidence of what good practical science looks like, it seems we’re not listening.

Part of the debate about practical science rests on the fact that we don’t even agree on the basics: what makes a good practical lesson? What are practical lessons supposed to achieve? How can schools improve the quality of their practical science?

In 2015, Ofqual removed practical exams from science GCSEs and A levels. Instead, practical skills and knowledge are tested through written exams. Students are supposed to do some practicals – but if they perform poorly, it doesn’t affect their grade.

The goal was to give teachers the freedom to do more interesting, open-ended experiments with their students – not just follow recipes at the lab bench. But many people disagreed with these changes, including the Education Secretary at the time, Nicky Morgan, who said it would harm the next generation of scientists, and the Wellcome Trust who said the reformed A levels won’t reflect students’ abilities. The professional bodies complained that many of the existing practical exams for A level had already been interesting, open-ended investigations, exactly the kind of experiments that the changes were supposed to favour – and they had just been scrapped.

There is a risk that teachers use their new freedom to cut the number of practicals they offer students. Most teachers believe that for A levels, the changes have been positive – but not all do.

So, what is new?

The Gatsby Foundation’s new report, Good Practical Science, draws together research from around the world on good quality practical science at school. The report authors visited teachers and education experts in 19 schools in Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore and the USA – all countries which perform very highly on the PISA rankings that compare countries’ education systems.

Sir John Holman, who led the report, and his colleagues identified ten benchmarks for good practical work. The benchmarks are pragmatic and workable. They include things like ‘teachers know the purpose of any practical activity’ and ‘each lab has enough equipment for students to work in small groups’. Yet, a sample of 10% of the UK’s schools found that none of them achieved more than seven out of ten of the benchmarks. A third of UK schools didn’t achieve a single benchmark.

You might think these benchmarks are just for science teachers – that groups of science teachers and technicians need to get together and work through the benchmarks, one by one. But most of the Good Practical Science report’s recommendations are aimed at people who aren’t teachers, including government, Ofqual, Ofsted, teaching unions, teacher trainers, science professional bodies, funders, and others.

To achieve the benchmarks, science departments need support from this wider group – and that means those of us who work to support schools need to consider how we contribute to these recommendations.

Teachers face tough decisions every day: shall I do a practical or a revision class? Shall we arrange a trip to a local science centre or university, or will that disrupt the teaching timetable too much? We can’t just keep adding more and more tasks to teachers’ already hefty workloads.

At the British Science Association, we are committed to helping schools achieve these benchmarks. Benchmark Eight is ‘investigative projects: students should have opportunities to do open-ended and extended investigative projects’. For over thirty years, the British Science Association and partner organisations have provided the CREST Awards scheme, which supports five to 19-year-olds to do their own open-ended, investigative projects in science, technology, engineering or maths. We recently launched a new digital platform that enables all teachers, right across the UK, to sign up for a free CREST account. This year sees our biggest-ever programme of grants for schools, to enable them to do engaging, investigative science activities with their students and local communities.

But CREST Awards alone won’t help schools achieve the ten benchmarks. We all need to work together to support our schools to achieve these benchmarks. UK schools score well on their labs, technicians and equipment compared to schools in other countries What we lack is a joint commitment to achieving these benchmarks. Thanks to the work done by John Holman and the Gatsby Foundation, we finally have the evidence we have been waiting for – and so it is down to us to grasp the opportunity to make the UK’s practical school science world-class.

Find out more about the CREST Awards here: http://www.crestawards.org/

Sweden, the Scandinavian nation famous for ABBA, Björn Borg, and Volvo, is leading the way when it comes to becoming the world’s first cashless country – and the technology behind Bitcoin, and the cryptocurrencies it has spawned, is catalysing the process.

Two years ago, in October 2015, Niklas Arvidsson, a researcher in industrial economics and management at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, helped to produce a study that predicted his country would be the first to introduce a cashless society. “Cash is still an important means of payment in many countries’ markets, but that no longer applies here in Sweden,” he said.

The progressive Swedes are on course to achieving their lofty aim, and other Scandinavian nations are following suit. Consider that reports indicate that 56.3 per cent of the country’s 1,600 bank branches – 900 of 1,600 – neither hold cash nor accept cash deposits any longer. Further, circulation of the country’s traditional currency, the Swedish krona, has been falling for some time; in 2009 the figure was SEK106 billion whereas last year it was just SEK60bn. Why is this happening?

According to data obtained from Visa, Swedes use bank cards three times more often than the average European. And a Riksbank report, published in December 2016, showed that 97 per cent of the country has access to cards, compared with 85 per cent cash.

There are many additional benefits to living in a society that does not need to use cash – not least when it comes to personal safety. People are less likely to be robbed, and also thieves will not as easily be able to sell on their stolen items.

Another key factor is the rise in popularity of Swish, an app owned by six Swedish banks (Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Länsförsäkringar, Nordea, SEB and Swedbank). It allows anyone with a smartphone to transfer money from one bank account to another, in real time. All that is required is the sender and receiver’s phone numbers.

Swish was launched in 2012 and by the end of 2015 it had attracted 3.6 million users, which is more than a third of Sweden’s 9.9 million population. Also that year some $515 million was transferred using the app. Those eye-opening numbers have increased significantly since, and now even churches have started to reveal their telephone numbers at the end of each service to make it easier for parishioners to boost their coffers.

This trend has forced Sweden’s central banks to consider introducing a digital form of government-backed money, and the technology behind Bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency launched eight years ago, is being promoted as a leading option.

A major concern about going cashless in Sweden is that it could exclude the ‘unbankables’ – that is people without a bank account – and those who do not own a smartphone. Bitcoin, however, has the ability to solve those problems through technology. Users do not require a bank account, and they can, in effect, spend their money anonymously.

Bitcoins and other top cryptocurrencies – Ethereum, Ripple, Dash, Litecoin, and Ethereum Classic – can be purchased outright, and in a straightforward manner, from investment platform eToro, for instance. It has six million members across 140 countries and the company’s motto is “crypto needn’t be cryptic”. Trading on eToro is attractive because it has a fast online verification process, global offices (including in the United Kingdom), and members can use the CopyTrader tool to match the strategies of top-performing traders.

Many in the FinTech space believe the Blockchain, a decentralised ledger which is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, is the real game-changing innovation. In Sweden, and elsewhere, they have already toyed with ways in which it can be used in their public services. And sooner rather than later it could well underpin the world’s first cashless society.

There was a furore in early August this year – and rightfully so – when Google software engineer, James Damore, asserted that it was women’s ‘biological differences’ and tendency towards ‘neuroticism’ which were responsible for the small numbers of women who worked as coders. Damore promptly lost his position at Google, but not before he opened a large kettle of socially-conscious fish. Why are there so few women working at the technical end of the tech industry? And what can we do to correct this?

In 2016 the UK saw the greatest fall in tech GCSE grades since 2011. This highlighted two worrying particulars; firstly and most obviously, it would suggest a potential future skills shortage in the key areas of science and technology. Secondly, and perhaps of greater overall concern, nine out of ten students studying these subjects were boys. Where were all the female would-be doctors, vets, engineers and coders? Apparently they were all off studying home economics, drama and social care. While there is nothing wrong with that, one can’t help but wonder where these vast gender differences in education have come from. The one thing you can be certain of, is it’s absolutely nothing to do with biology or neuroticism!

While in the UK at GCSE level, only 20% of students studying computer science are female, and by the time that you reach degree level that figure has dropped even further to 16%, in countries such as India, Malaysia and Nigeria the gender balance is split approximately 50-50. This would imply that unconscious bias may well be playing a greater role in the UK: if girls believe that the sciences are a more masculine field they may not see them as viable study and work options for themselves.

Although there is a solid argument of ‘each to their own’ when it comes to career choice – after all, we can’t all be neuroscientists – we live in a world where technology touches practically every line of work and every aspect of life. Even traditionally natural, hands-on roles, such as farming and gardening, now rely on technology in multiple ways, so the student who doesn’t understand the fundamentals of computer science finds themselves at an immediate disadvantage. So what can we do to redress the balance?

Introducing STEM subjects at a young age – and making them fun – has to be one avenue worth exploring. Not only as a means to encourage girls into the sciences, but to encourage overall participation. For instance Dash and Dot were designed based on feedback from both boys and girls to make sure it appealed to both.

At Wonder Workshop we combine programming with robotics to give children the chance to discover the cause and effect relationship of programming, gradually increasing the technical demands according to each individual child’s growing abilities. But there are other approaches – Goldiblox, HiddenFigures and LittleBits, for example, or even games such as MineCraft – which embrace the same concept, helping children to learn coding and computer science through play. In my view, it is this approach which will show girls – and boys – not only that coding, programming, robotics, science and maths can be engaging and rewarding subjects to study, but that they’re also firmly within their reach. Perhaps just as importantly, by beginning at a young age and showing boys that girls can perform equally well in these subjects – if not better – we might be able to remove the ingrained gender bias which currently exists.

In 1984 34% of all computer science jobs were held by women. In 2017 that figure has fallen to just 18%. This must surely be unacceptable by anyone’s standards. Not everyone wants to work in the sciences. As a species we need people to do a variety of things. But we also need every girl and every boy to have the same opportunities to do whatever they want with their lives. And providing a strong working knowledge of STEM subjects is currently the best way to help make sure that that happens.

Christopher Cederskog is Managing Director Europe of Wonder Workshop

Elastagen Pty Ltd

Elastagen Pty Ltd

Elastagen Pty Ltd