KickTraq

Hi Everyone, Just wanted to send out a quick note for the final push for cloudBoard. This Kickstarter is the only way to get cloudBoard first!  Please help by sending the Kickstarter link to anyone who might be on the fence. We hope to have... (Read More)

There are only 5 days left in our Kickstarter campaign! It’s pretty clear that we’re a long way from our goal, but we still encourage anyone to share this project to those who might be interested – parents, educators, developers, anyone!... (Read More)

You've probably already seen some of the worlds of Cork The Volcano, but today we wanted to talk about the different worlds currently in the beta version. While some of these environments may feel pretty standard, we’re definitely pushing for more... (Read More)

We wanted to wish everyone celebrating Thanksgiving to have a safe and fun holiday! But more than that, we hope everyone can appreciate the gift of a funny article to brighten their day.  We often search for cloudBoard around the web and sometimes... (Read More)

Blocks are reprogrammable for new games and easily replaceable if lost... Lets elaborate on how we envision this working, because we've actually put a lot of thought into choosing this direction.  The brain of the puzzle block is the expensive part.... (Read More)

Cork The Volcano is the first game to launch alongside cloudBoard, and while we’re proud of what we’ve done with the game so far, we have other concepts we’re excited to talk about. Today we’re going to talk a bit about the Chemistry Game... (Read More)

Community Outreach We wanted to share a story about co-hosting a game design activity with Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Pittsburgh, where children and their mentors learned about design while modifying Checkers. Read more WebinarWe're also very... (Read More)

cloudBoard in the news! Mashable wrote a great article about cloudBoard this morning - check it out if you haven't already: http://mashable.com/2013/11/22/cloudboard-kickstarter/ Most of the “enemies” in Cork The Volcano are native creatures of... (Read More)

Creating an educational game that's actually fun to play is challenging, but the cloudBoard teaches problem-solving through hands-on video games. (Read More)

Quick update on cloudBoard's public demos. Yesterday, we went to the Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference (TRETC) in Pittsburgh, PA. Over 75 educators played cloudBoard while informally brainstorming with us about different ways cloudBoard... (Read More)

Cork The Volcano pulls lots of inspiration from our collective childhood. We realize Cork The Volcano oozes a retro vibe at times (almost always intentional), harkening back to the golden age of 16-bit platformers. While we didn't let the old-school... (Read More)

We found an interesting post on Reddit that we wanted to share: We wanted to post an update highlighting the awesome power of Arduino. Once we had the concept for what cloudBoard would be, we started hacking things together to start testing as... (Read More)

In yesterday's update, we mentioned that we've been getting some of our Mk. 5 prototypes to families for some in-home testing and impressions. Today, we got a very nice surprise from one such family, Penny-Arcade's own Mike Krahulik (a.k.a. Gabe).... (Read More)

We began delivering a few early hardware prototypes to families in the Pittsburgh area recently to test in their homes. We wanted to share a couple of quotes we have received about cloudBoard and Cork The Volcano: "I should tell you that there was... (Read More)

For the third playable character, we went back and forth a bit about what it should be. There was a point where we wanted each character to have a different physique for potential added abilities (as mentioned before, for example, Hippo the hedgehog... (Read More)

“We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there,” says Justin Sabo, quoting Neil deGrasse Tyson. With regard to his startup Digital Dream Labs and the first product they are pushing, the cloudBoard, this quote hits home. In a market landscape that is already dominantly developed by children’s toys like Leapfrog and Skylanders, Digital Dream Labs is standing out. Their flagship prodcut, the cloudBoard, takes the tablet kids have come to love, pairs it with the education they need, and packages it into engaging videogames that use puzzle pieces as input. (Read More)

The design of Rus (top) and Hippo (bottom) went through several changes before the current beta version of Cork The Volcano. In some form or another, Rus and Hippo have been in the game longer than any other character. Early on, we wanted to include... (Read More)