Author: Lien

Without Mosquitoes, there is no Dengue: UM students use HvM to teach Panama youth about vector-borne diseases

[youtube width=”600″ height=”365″ video_id=”1UwFxNza8ac”] During Summer 2014 in the semi-autonomous Panamanian community known as Kuna Yala, a team of University of Miami Public Health and Latin American Studies students participated in an educational intervention to raise awareness about mosquito avoidance and disease prevention among Kuna Yala’s 10-12 year old schoolchildren. They were successful in engaging […]

Training Shelter Staff at His House

In August 2014, the University of Miami published an article on my Toma el Paso game, including some coverage on a recently training I did with shelter staff at His House in Miami Gardens. The full article can be found here: http://everitas.univmiami.net/2014/08/21/make-a-move-professors-board-game-helps-young-immigrants-plot-their-futures/

SIGGRAPH DAC Aesthetics of Gameplay exhibit of indie games available online

In early 2014, the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (DAC) launched the Aesthetics of Gameplay online exhibition. Ian Bogost captures what this exhibition aims to showcase in his article entitled “Persuasive Games: From Aberrance to Aesthetics”: “But when one finds a game that does manage to deliver a detectable aesthetic — a set of creative principles and effects that make it the […]

Cops & Rubbers video is now live!

[vimeo width=”600″ height=”365″ video_id=”93179928″]  Have you played Cops & Rubbers? Watch this video to learn more about my Cops & Rubbers game project with Open Society Foundations’ Public Health and Rights Project, which is based on OSF’s Criminalizing Condoms report. For more on Cops & Rubbers: On my website: https://lienbtran.com/games/cops-rubbers/ On the OSF website: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/cops-rubbers   Thanks to Ed Talavera, […]

Invoking the Pause selects “Games for the Caribbean Climate” as 2014 Grant Partner

I’m pleased to announce that my proposal for “Games for a Caribbean Climate” – joint with Red Cross Caribbean Disaster Risk Management Reference Center (CADRIM) and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre – is a 2014 Invoking the Pause (ITP) Grant Partner! Thanks to Invoking the Pause, we will be conducting a 2-day workshop in Barbados […]

Vanity 2.0 now available

In Fall 2013 Clay Ewing and I went back and did some tweaking to the original Vanity game. Some of the changes were to make the gameplay more user friendly, like eliminating the moles all together and instead using stackers that move along a numbered column to track your fitness, tan, style, and health risk. […]

Extreme Candy wins Best Game at Global Game Jam!

I teamed up with Clay Ewing (@claytical), Joel Acosta (@LoseTV), and Brian Deltoro in this year’s Global Game Jam from January 24-26. FIU’s Game Developers Guild kindly hosted us and got sponsors to provide food and drinks to fuel all of us through the 48-hour game jam! Our game Extreme Candy Photo Bomb Scavenger Memory […]

Creating Crowdsourcing Mobile App to Monitor Water Quality in Ghana

Article sourced from UM Interactive website (September 2013) With the global population booming and water-borne diseases on the rise, developing nations are faced with the serious challenge of providing clean water to their citizens. Of particular concern are many cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, which are expected to fall short of Millennium Development Goals for ensuring adequate […]