Last year we visited our friend Elena and her newborn daughter Sofia. I left Sofia with two presents: a jumper with a cute original koala design, and a black and white picture of “janky cat.”

Mr. Janky Cat is a character inspired by conversations with Jason. “You know how some cats just have their stuff together? Sleek, smart, composed? And some cats just do not?Janky Cat wears a beanie like a sailor. When he plays Go, he just tries to make pictures out of his stones. A successful game is when he can make a heart out of the stones without interference from his opponent.

Elena reported afterward that, “Sofia loves looking at the cat picture!” and, “did you know that infant vision can only resolve high-contrast images, so they love to look at black and white art?” and, “doesn’t Erica have about a thousand black and white drawings?”

It’s true. I love to draw with that black and white, heavy-line medium. And so, one year later, we have Baby Smart Cards, our first educational app. The app stars around 70 black and white images designed specifically to entertain an infant.

Here’s the pitch on Baby Smart Cards:

Q. What do new parents like?
A. They like having the smartest baby.

Q. What do new parents like to buy?
A. Things that will make their baby smarter.

And so, we join the cadre of apps for new parents and apps for infants.

The question remains open, though: can an app make your baby smarter?

Short answer: maybe.

Long answer: wouldn’t that be wonderful? Research in infant cognitive up until the 1970s was inconclusive about whether infants’ reactions to visual stimuli could reasonably predict, influence, or correlate with childhood IQ. Some studies yielded statistically significant correlation, others showed negative correlation. Studies since the 1970s make claims that as babies grow accustomed to different stimuli (scientists call that familiarity “habituation”) they can process information more rapidly and efficiently. But those studies include the big buzzkill of a caveat that any finding of mental activity in infants is strictly indicative of their brains at the time of the test, not an indicator of potential IQ(1).

However, anecdotal and scientific evidence both show that infants love looking at thick-lined black and white images, which are images they can actually process (unlike the visual inputs that compose the entire rest of the world) (2)(3).

(1) “Can measures of infant habituation predict later intellectual
ability?”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1717406/pdf/v077p00474.pdf
A. SLATER (1997)

(2) “On the Neural Mechanisms Underlying Developmental and Individual Differences in Visual Fixation in Infancy: Two Hypotheses”
http://www.people.ku.edu/~colombo/Colombo%20(1995a).pdfJohn Colombo, 1995
“Infants reflexively look at high-contrast stimuli.”

(3)The Child with Cancer: Camily-Centered Care in Practice
Helen Langton pp. 81
“Young infants do not look with equal attention, they tend to look at things that are fairly large and have high contrast, such as a pair of eyes or the border between a person’s hair and forehead.”

Get us while we’re hot.

☺

Armed with some charismatic Flash, a proven Proof of Concept, and our undampened ideas and enthusiasm, we were ready to learn real iPhone app tools. Big Girl iPhone App Development. In Jason’s case, Big Boy.

We wanted to collaborate on game animation, but what software to use? Blender? Maya? After Effects?

“How about Quartz Composer?” suggested Jason. “I’ve taken a look, and it seems really intuitive. Check it out!”

Oh, I checked it out. There were strange boxes with words like “Number Splitter.” I know what those words mean on their own, but together they just didn’t make any sense.*

And now, a pause to announce that Quartz Composer is in fact an awesome program made by smart and talented people with attractive friends and even more attractive and loving significant others, and they all go out to dinner parties to discuss their fulfilling work and wildly successful side projects. “I drew a doodle at lunch, now it’s a top-selling t-shirt on Amazon!” says one.

“That’s amazing! The idea that I had in a dream last week is now being turned into a major motion picture starring two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou (as me) and Oscar winner Charlize Theron (also as me) (it was quite a dream!).”

My point: Quartz Composer is awesome for the computer-mancers and artstars who know how to use it. For me, it was like hooking up arbitrary vacuum tubes, turning the thing on, and hoping the whole machine wouldn’t just blow apart.

Below is an excellent example of Quartz Composer as she is meant to be used:

Beautiful, yes? But it would be years of practice and training before I’d be able to rise to that highest light using this particular tool.

So if I couldn’t Quartz Compose, what would we use to build the game? My drawings with Jason’s code?

NEXT: My drawings with Jason’s code, plus some frightened-looking toast. Crazy Shapes starts to take shape! Stay tuned!

* copping a line from Lisa Simpson, in the Simpsons episode Bart vs. Australia, regarding the Yahoo Serious Film Festival. “I know what those words mean, but together they just don’t make any sense!

The colors are simple, there’s no background art, and you had to move around with arrow keys on the computer. But most of the basic gameplay in the Flash game is exactly the same as the final version of Crazy Shapes on iPhone and iPad: four different piece types, push the pieces into their targets, and pieces bounce off the walls or each other.

We considered (and nixed) gameplay features like rotations, flips, and deforming shapes. It seemed hard and complicated, and what we already had was so simple and fun—even though the physics were messed up, collisions were worse, and detecting whether you’d actually hit your target was tricky. We eventually went with making shapes and targets the same size and basing scoring on center-to-center proximity.

“My high score is 883,420!” said Jason.

Already, the game could hook someone in for 10 minutes and more of serious attention with just a simple concept. This was something to keep pursuing …

UP NEXT: Crazy Shapes, the Robot Flash Animation!

* “proof of concept.” I mention, because I had never heard the term before.

“Do you have any ideas for a simple game?”

Why yes! Yes I did!

Below are Erica’s initial sketches: a simple arcade game of matching shapes up to their correspondingly-shaped goals. Please forgive the production quality; these were made using MS Paint during a well-earned break from her corporate job.