Hello everyone, today we have a bit of an unusual Dream Flight blog post.  Normally we share the exciting news about our missions or what’s going on with our simulators.  But today, I’m going to write on a more personal note.  It all revolves around a special simulator that very few people know about:  the IKS Gallant:

This is the IKS Gallant… or, I should say it’s the Gallant when it was about 80% complete.  The main viewscreen projector and crew control stations are all missing.  Please pardon the dim photo—this shot was taken during our early tests of our multi-color lighting system.

The IKS Gallant was the first simulator I ever built.  I built it within my own home way back in 2011, and it completely filled my living room.  It was designed to fit six people and was made mostly of PVC pipe and expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam.  This was back in the early days of Dream Flight Adventures—before we had partnerships, any products in the market, or really anything beyond stacks of concept sketches and design files.  But we did have a dream—and a passion to bring it to life.

At the time I had completed a major milestone in the development of our simulator control software and just returned from the INplay conference in Toronto, which centered around using apps, digital media, and storytelling as an engagement tool, particularly for education.  We had officially formed the company just a month or two prior to that, and it was high time to start sharing our vision with the world.

There was just one problem—our experience is really something that you have to see to believe.  No amount of enthusiastic hand-waving while spouting off superlative adjectives could do it justice.  The photos and video from the Christa McAullife Space Education Center (Dream Flight’s inspiration) helped, but it still wasn’t enough.  I had to show people and let them experience it firsthand.  So, I built a spaceship in my living room.

The original plan was to move the simulator to a new location once a partner was identified, so the Gallant was built so it could be easily disassembled, moved, and then reassembled in another location.  However, before we finished building it things started falling into place with our first partner—Shaler Area School District—and work on the Gallant stopped while we shifted our attention toward the IKS Titan.

Since that time Dream Flight Adventures has soared to new heights, with new simulators and missions being created all the time.  But whatever happened to the IKS Gallant?  Well, it stayed right where it was, dominating my living room for the past three years.  It was hugely inconvenient, but it sure made for a good conversation starter when we had guests over.  It also made for an interesting guest bedroom and board game room from time to time.  And to top it off, the Gallant was the very first Dream Flight simulator to host a birthday party:  my son’s sixth birthday in 2012.

So for the past three years the IKS Gallant has partially blocked my front door and served as a powerful reminder of where Dream Flight Adventures all began.  But time stops for no one, and it eventually became time for the Gallant to be decommissioned.  Two weeks ago a rainstorm put a damper on my weekend plans, so I dusted off the old tritanium arc welder and set to work.

Here’s the IKS Gallant as seen from the rear and facing the viewscreen right as deconstruction began.  You’ll notice the piles of miscellaneous junk that had been tossed onto the old bridge.  The small round holes in the walls were points where the crew control desks would connect with into the walls.  The giant gap beneath the main viewscreen was never filled because it was going to be covered by the front row of crew stations.  The back row of crew stations sat on a raised platform at the rear of the simulator.

One by one the wall panels came off to reveal the underlying skeleton—and to restore access to parts of the living room that hadn’t been seen for years.

Here is the ship completely stripped of its paneling.  You’ll notice the bookcase in the back corner—holding a whole slew of books we hadn’t had access to since the Gallant was first built.

I have to admit that I wasn’t prepared for this experience.  I thought I’d be reclaiming my living room and packing pipes into my basement, but the experience was much more than that.  In fact—and much to my surprise—I found myself getting choked up.  Taking down the Gallant took only a few hours (it took several months to build!), but that was a long time to reflect on all the sweet memories it provided as well as all the profound experiences it subsequently brought into my life.

The Gallant was the beginning of what has been the most invigorating and rewarding journey of my career—and the realization of a childhood dream.  Now that dream has come to life and is inspiring new dreams in thousands of children—most of whom I’ll never even meet.  The Gallant may not have ever been fully constructed, but it completed its mission far more successfully than I had ever hoped.  It flew well, and I was honored to create it.  And who knows?  Perhaps like a phoenix it will rise from the ashes and take on a new form.  The IKS Gallant will fly again!

We apologize for the relative silence on our blog lately.  As you will soon discover, we’ve been occupied by top secret activities.  I can’t tell you how exhausting it has been, sweeping for bugs and hidden cameras every time I walk into a new room, entering a 16-digit prime number PINs to make phone calls, and being careful not to accidentally bite down on my cyanide capsule molar during dinner.  But after long last, the statute of limitations for this highly confidential project has passed and I can now share the exciting news with the world.

Because of our expertise in interactive storytelling and themed experiences, the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh asked us to sponsor an annual event celebrating their first year of an exciting program called STARTup SOMETHING.  For the past twelve months the program has connected teenagers and their mentors with entrepreneurs and their startup companies in an effort to promote career readiness and important life skills.  Where do we come in, you ask?  Dream Flight Adventures transformed their year-end celebration event into an interactive game-based competition.

Donning a secret agent theme, we created an experience that pitted two elite secret agent groups (Team Manticore and Team Kracken) against each other in a cutthroat competition to develop the best global intelligence network.

It had cinematic cutscenes, cover identities, secret missions, code words—the works—and it all led up to a dramatic final showdown.  Fun was had by all, and we were delighted to give back to the local community by sponsoring such an exciting event.

Courtesy of Richard Johnson’s Imagination Series

It’s been a bit quiet on the Dream Flight blog lately, which is a sure sign that we’re up to more than our usual shenanigans.  We just got back from presenting at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, and we have several interesting new developments to report on in the near-ish future.

But for today, I want to take a moment to chat about something that isn’t exactly new but certainly is important and sometimes gets overlooked.

We like to make a big to-do whenever we unveil new missions (like Countdown and Contaminant, our latest additions to our mission library).  We talk about the premise, highlight the curriculum components, and give a sneak peak into a few of the main characters.  Our missions are rich and elaborate stories, so it’s easy to get caught up in the details of their plots.

As a result, however, sometimes we gloss over the fact that each of our missions represents a rich and fully interactive virtual world.  Yes, our Flight Directors can take intrepid crews on adventures from the beginning, through the middle, and to the end of our stories… but they’re equally free to invent stories of their own—based on their own imaginations or even the actions of the kids!

This has always been the case, but lately we’ve made the creative process even easier for our Flight Directors by packaging up a collection of virtual world construction tools and putting them at their fingertips.  We call them Creator’s Canvases, and they are completely open-ended versions of our virtual worlds that give educators powerful tools to create any learning adventure they want. The possibilities are endless!

This week—Wednesday through Friday—Dream Flight Adventures will be presenting at the Games Learning Society conference in Madison Wisconsin.  Special thanks to the Sprout Fund’s support for travel expenses to help us share about our exciting work with a national audience.  Stay tuned to our blog or Twitter feed for updates as the conference progresses.

What’s up with Pittsburgh?  Before I moved to Pittsburgh six or so years ago my only exposure to the city had been an obscure quote from Short Circuit.

Little did I know that Pittsburgh was absolutely the best place in the world to launch Dream Flight Adventures.  There is an incredibly collaborative ecosystem of innovators, educators, and support organizations that promote creativity and learning here!  If it weren’t for Idea Foundry, the Allegheny Intermedia Unit, the Grable Foundation, and the Kids+Creativity Network, our incredible program—which is now enjoyed by thousands of kids—would still just be a PVC-pipe prototype in my living room.

It was two years and two months ago at the Allegheny Intermediate Unit where we connected with our first school partner—Shaler Area School District—and now the program has grown to new heights and surpassed our wildest dreams.  The IKS Titan is blazing the trail, we have several new simulators under construction, and we just unveiled a sister product, Mission Ops.

And now, the Allegheny Intermediate Unit is at it again, offering another round of STEAM Grants to catalyze innovative schools in the greater Pittsburgh region.  We’re pleased to announce that we’re partnering with the Allegheny Intermediate Unit to offer Mission Ops to the schools who develop interactive STEAM Labs through the STEAM Grants this year.

For more information, please check out this summary sheet (PDF) or contact us.  We’re excited to give back to the community that gave us our start—not to mention bringing interactive education to more students than ever before!

Today we’re pleased to unveil yet another exciting development from the Dream Flight labs.

Ever since we launched our first simulator, which seats 16 students at a time, we wanted to create a companion experience for the other half of a typical class of students.  We set the bar high:  the experience had to complement the curriculum of our simulator missions—that was the easy part—but it also had to maintain our magical blend of interactive story-telling and high stakes adventures—that was the hard part.  And as icing on the cake, we wanted the experience to have lower technical requirements so it could be as accessible as possible in a wide variety of classroom settings.

After many long months and repeated visits back to the drawing board, we’re pleased to launch Mission Ops as this awesome sister product to accompany our full immersion simulators.

In Mission Ops, students become Agents in an Infinity Knight’s Command Center where they apply their knowledge to guide operatives through challenging missions.  Mission Ops uses the same winning combination of story-driven high stakes collaborative learning but follows a different format that emphasizes hands-on projects in small teams and can be deployed in a wide variety of environments.  It was designed from the ground up to integrate into any existing or new STEAM learning environment.  When students embark on a Mission Ops adventure, they forget that they are students in a normal classroom and become absorbed in the epic challenge at hand.

Head on over to our Mission Ops page for more details.