Rogo

Why puzzles?

Dr_Rogo — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 04:53:56 +0000

It is interesting – even puzzling (!) to ponder the appeal of puzzles. Puzzles are popular among many ages and cultures, though not all people like them, and different people get enjoyment from different puzzles types. Older people are often keen puzzlers, especially now that their time puzzling is legitimised as “brain training”. Children can be happily engrossed in puzzles for hours. The puzzle category in the App store is well populated, with engaging games such as Cut the rope and Trainyard.

Types of puzzles

For many years the predominant puzzles in the English-speaking world were crosswords and all their variety. They ranged from straightforward, with simple clues, to cryptic. Individual crossword makers had their own styles, and personal following. The puzzle was part of a relationship between the creator and the solver. There was even an American Game show, “Merv Griffin’s Crosswords”, where five contestants competed to answer clues and then finish off the joint puzzle in the allotted time.

Recently Sudoku has become a worldwide phenomenon. No self-respecting newspaper would fail to have a Sudoku puzzle. Though Sudoku appears to be a number puzzle, it is a logic puzzle, with no arithmetic involved. Letters or symbols can substitute for the numbers. Killer Sudoku and Kenken use the “fill in a grid” principle, but also combine addition and other arithmetic operations.

The nature of puzzles

Puzzles are a way of spending time. A puzzle book can fill in hours waiting for appointments or riding in trains. They can take you away from troubles. When I was afraid of flying, I would carry cryptic crosswords from the Press newspaper, and concentrate intently on them during take-off and landing. The concentration required to solve the tricky clues saved me from panicky thoughts.
Puzzles are a way of making sense out of chaos. There is something satisfying in taking a jigsaw puzzle, and turning it from a pile of seemingly unrelated to pieces into a flat, smooth complete picture. A filled-in crossword or Sudoku grid gives a sense of completion.
There is an aspect of problem-solving in most puzzles. Computer programmers, statisticians and operations researchers can feel this satisfaction as they solve the problems and puzzles inherent in their work. As the creators of Rogo have skills in these areas, we are aware of many other puzzles waiting to be developed from real-life problem-solving.
Teachers use puzzles for teaching, especially the overworked word-search, easy to create and requiring little from the solver other than time and perserverance. Crosswords do at least require recall or logic to complete as a homework exercise. Getting students to create their own puzzles can encourage creativity. An earlier post gives suggestions for this.
Creating Rogo, and crafting individual puzzles has drawn our attention to what makes a good puzzle. We have created many individual Rogo puzzle instances for solution on paper, in the app, for research purposes, and for education. Each instance has its own combination of features. We aim for them to be difficult enough for a challenge, but not frustratingly insoluble. Sometimes the answer is such that you laugh when you find it – wondering how you could have missed it before. There is a fine line between difficulty and tedium, however. A Rogo puzzle with few blank squares would be difficult to solve, but not much fun. We assumed that little 6 step Rogos would only be of interest to children, but our adult solvers enjoy the quick challenge, trying to solve them without trial and error.

By putting Rogo into an iPhone app, we have removed the adding and counting needed in solving Rogos. This changes their nature somewhat and makes them more fun, in my opinion, but there is also something satisfying in adding up the numbers myself when solving on paper.

Research on puzzles

We have recently embarked on research as to what aspects of Rogo puzzles affect the level of difficulty for human problem-solving. There is little research on the how and why of human puzzle-solving. However it seems to be an important part of life, and we at Creative Heuristics and the University of Canterbury (Dr Petty and Dr Dye) are keen to explore this further.

Tell us what puzzles you like, and why. What is it that appeals to you in Rogo puzzles?

Note: Christhchurch, the home of Rogo, was hit by a devastating earthquake in late February 2011 and then again in June 2011. We are now recovering, and intend to resume posting more often.

Rogo for children

Dr_Rogo — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 21:05:28 +0000

This week I’m keen for some feedback from teachers and parents – and kids themselves. I am trying out a new form of Rogo, which involves various starting points, and has a story behind it.

I’d love to have some comments about it, especially about the instructions!

If you have trouble printing it, you can download a pdf version. Rogo_pictorial

By the way, Kimi is name of our pukeko mascot. The pukeko is a cheeky New Zealand native bird that lives in wetlands and eats bugs, as well as foliage, fish and frogs.

A pictorial Rogo puzzle for children

YouTube video

Dr_Rogo — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:44:42 +0000

An instructional video needs to be short, clear and easy to understand. This sounds obvious, but can be difficult to achieve. The Youtube video that the iPhone app links to was made by me (DrRogo), using all that my son, William, has taught me. You may be interested to see our previous efforts under the name of UCMSCI on Youtube. The experience developing these instructional videos proved invaluable. Our most popular video is “Understanding the p-value”.

Software: CS5, Screenflow, Audacity

We used Adobe Creative Suite 5, using Photoshop to edit the photos, Illustrator to make the speech bubbles, and Premiere to edit the video. The video capture of the game in progress was made by Shane (Rogowiz) using Screenflow. The music was edited using a fabulous freeware product, Audacity.

I would not recommend using such powerful programmes as in CS5 for something as straightforward as this. iMovie should be sufficient, along with Photoshop elements. Much of the time I felt I was teetering on the knife-edge of competence, and any moment I could do something stupid that would be irreversible. However, I never did fall off the knife-edge.

Process

A raw shot of Dr Rogo and Nick before editting

It took about five attempts to write and storyboard the video. At first it was going to be simply instructional, and we also toyed with a “Question and Answer” format, but finally came up with the idea of Dr Rogo helping Nick learn to play Rogo. The photos of Dr Rogo and Nick were taken in front of a white sheet, as a video, and then still clips were taken out of the video and the white background was removed. The gold coin was a dinner plate, which was then replaced in the final clip.
I found that the screen capture video tended to be a little slow, but if we speeded it up, the sound changed pitch, so instead I removed little segments of video where nothing was happening.

Music

Once finished, The clip seemed a little sterile, so I added some music we had recorded Jonathan Petty playing when we were recording the music for the game itself. As Pachelbel’s Canon in D was written in the seventeenth century, there are no problems with copyright infringement. (For a humorous commentary on Pachelbel’s Canon see this Youtube clip)

Decisions

Movie-making is FULL of decisions. Which background should we use for the puzzle? Which puzzle should we use for the demonstration? Speaking or no speaking? Hand or arrow pointer? What colour T-shirts? What music, if any? How to finish? Title sequence? Credits? If a three minute sequence required all these decisions it is difficult to envisage quite how many decisions must go into a movie like Avatar!

The outcome

Here you can see the finished product. You may wonder why the still is rather blurry. This is because when you upload to YouTube, it takes three still shots from the video from which you can choose the title still. Unfortunately all three of the still shots were taken during transitions, so even the best one looks rather strange. In the tight time-frame there wasn’t time to change the length of the video, render it again and upload it again.

Apart from that, we are pleased with the outcome, and hope it helps people to learn how to play and enjoy our great new puzzle app.

Invention Process

Dr_Rogo — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:31:12 +0000

Mother’s wisdom

My mother has often said “Nothing you ever learn is wasted”. Though I have my doubts about my disco dancing lessons in 1976, in general I have found this to be true. Certainly in the case of the development of Rogo, many things previously learned have proved invaluable.

Innovation

In an article in The Press about innovation Ezra Klein suggests that “genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent timing.” Our experiences with the innovation of Rogo and moving it from idea to reality suggest a similar ratio for the idea and the work involved. A successful product is 1 per cent great idea, and 99 per cent work. It is great to have a great idea, but without all the support mechanisms to get it to market, it remains only a great idea. And, Mr Klein, timing is also important.

The moment of creation

Dr Rogo and the vehicle of inspiration.

The idea for Rogo could be said to have arrived while I was biking along Innes Rd to work on 18 August 2009. But what led to that? A few months earlier I had started rogaining, and before that I had heard about rogaining at an Operations Research Conference. However, I was prepared for that idea by orienteering which I had participated in on my way to earning my Queen’s Scout Award in my teens. Another contributing factor was my love for board games (a major motivation for having children was the hope that they would play board games with me), and enjoyment of computer games such as Civilisation and Settlers. So all those factors led to my idea on the bike: I could make a board game based on a Rogaine, using squares.

Partnership

Now we come to Shane. He too is interested in games of all kinds, and has a very good mathematical mind. We have adjacent offices in the Department of Management at the University of Canterbury and have worked together on multiple projects, most of which had been successful. (We will cast a veil over our attempt to revolutionise the teaching of Linear Programming, flying in the face of all the popular textbooks, the authors of some of which probably rejected our paper!)

Exploration

The first incarnation of a board for the Rogaine board game

I made a game board for the game, using Excel, and got the tutors to play it in our weekly tutors’ meeting. It went well, but obviously needed more work. Shane took home a copy of the board to try with his children. They enjoyed it, and as they were playing had drawn on the board, to overcome the problem of not retracing routes. Shane told me about this, then we went off to a lecture, where he was distributing teaching surveys for me. As he was handing them out, it came to me – make a puzzle instead! I had a picture in my mind of a pad of puzzles. And thus the embryo was formed of a great idea.
For the next few days we worked on some of the details. How long should the route be? We picked on 20 squares to start with. What should the board look like? We started with a Sudoku grid. Was it solvable on a computer? We started thinking about solution methods. Was it any fun? We tried using the Press Sudokus each morning as Rogo boards, and yes – we had fun.

Market Research

But it was necessary for other people to find them fun as well. A month or so later Shane was about to give his “Operations Research for intermediate school students” presentation the next day to his brother-in-law’s class from St Joseph’s, Papanui and I realised we had a captive set of guinea pigs. Quickly I generated a set of ten Rogo puzzles using an Excel grid, and turned them into a little booklet for the kids to try out. Looking back it is amazing they liked them. The puzzles were far too difficult, not all that interesting to look at, and the instructions needed a lot of work. But like them they did - a lot. I remember Shane saying, “I think we’re onto something!”.

Support

Another piece of good fortune lay in our employment at the University of Canterbury. Not only had it meant that Shane and I were working together, but it was also an environment which nurtured innovation and getting ideas out into the world. The “Research and Innovation” office were extremely helpful in giving us advice on Intellectual Property and in enabling us to buy back the Intellectual Property from the University, while still allowing us to develop it in work time. Their enthusiastic support was also a morale booster. The University continues to help us in letting people know about Rogo.

The cover of the first Rogo booklet

We gave out copies of the booklet to various family, friends and colleagues and got different feedback. A comment from Bruce, who now works with us on the app, led to the introduction of black “forbidden” squares. A comment from Mike with an iPhone that we should make an app, (My response: “What’s an app?”) led to our making the Rogo math puzzle app.

Values

This is only an outline of the physical and intellectual early development of the idea. The emotional or psychological aspects have also proved interesting. Both Shane and I are keen to do something worthwhile in the world, as are most people involved in Operations Research, known as the Science of Better. Did inventing a puzzle class as making the world a better place? Was it right to try to make money out of something so trivial as a puzzle? Though our religious beliefs are poles apart our values are strongly aligned. But we are united in our aim to do good. In fact the company mission statement is “Have Fun, Make Money, Do Good.”

An answer to my existential crisis came from Kuki, a teenage boy I taught in a church class. We were discussing the role of riches and righteousness and relating it to our puzzle dilemma. Kuki asked, “Is it a good puzzle?”. That was the right question, and the answer was, “Yes – it is a good puzzle.” Good point Kuki!

Rogo is on its way

Rogo is a good puzzle. But being a good puzzle is not enough. We had to refine it, develop it in its various incarnations and market it. It is still making baby steps into the world. Keep following this blog and you can watch it blossom and burst forth on the world!

People

Dr_Rogo — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 23:44:53 +0000

Even for a small project like Rogo, there are many people involved. There are the inventors, the programmer, graphics, music, translations, testing, accounting, video and website to think of.

A comprehensive and dynamic list of people who have contributed will be on the Credits Page. Here we introduce some of them.

Bruce Webster, Nicola Ward Petty and Shane Dye.

Puzzle inventors

To start with there are the inventors: Nicola Ward Petty (me ) and my colleague, Dr Shane Dye. We came up with the idea for Rogo in the middle of 2009. I had recently taken up the sport of Rogaining, and felt that it would make a good board game. As we were working on that, we stumbled on the idea of a puzzle. To begin with the puzzles had no black (forbidden) squares, and we originally used a Sudoku grid and a twenty step route to see if that would be fun. We thought it was – and thus was born Rogo.

But this is about the people – the history can come another day.

I (Nicola) have been a lecturer in Operations Research for over 20 years at the University of Canterbury, the same University at which I gained first my BSc(Hons) and then my PhD. Shane Dye has also been lecturing in Operations Research at Canterbury for quite some time. His family is a bit younger and has provided a range of support. Shane, like me, has always been interested in games, and also education, and it would be fair to say that we tend towards being geeks.

App Development

Another key person in the team is Bruce Webster, who did the programming and much of the design work for the app. Bruce has a history of game development, right from when he was a young lad posting out Amiga games around the world. He is encouraged by his game-critic daughter who wants him to create “Dress-up-Zombie Attack”.

Pettys

Kimi the pukeko, drawn by William Petty

I am married to Mark and we have two grown sons, William and Jonathan. This is relevant because Mark is our bookkeeper, sales manager, purchasing manager, photographer and general “go-to-guy”. Jonathan provided two of the music tracks in the app, and William’s fiancée, Jessica, created most of the graphics.

William is currently serving a mission for our church, but will have an active role in the company on his return in less than two weeks. William intends also to resume his persona as The Dude in the Suede on “That Guy with the Glasses” . You can see him here on Youtube. The Dude in the Suede. Another example of William’s work is this amv which has proved popular: Crazy. And he sketched Kimi, the pukeko, who appears on our printed material and this website.

Music in the app

The music has an interesting story. We decided that music is important to some people in games, but being low-budget, decided not to go for anything too expensive. So Bruce suggested his friend Ari, who composes as Mystical Monk. We liked his sound and the first track on the app is one of his compositions. You can hear more of his work at http://soundcloud.com/mysticalmusicmonk

Jonathan Petty is blind and an autistic savant, and plays the piano as many of us breathe. We convinced him to play his arrangements of “Old Folks at home” and a Gymnopedie by Erik Satie, both of which are old enough to be out of copyright. We recorded him at Orange Studio here in Christchurch.

The three tracks provide an interesting mixture of lively and calm, which Brad Hildebrand at 148 games commented on: “The game also features a very nice, mellow soundtrack that does a great job of setting the perfect mood.”

If you would like to see more of Jonathan, here are three places where he appears on Youtube:

White Cliffs of Dover

NZ’s Got Talent

Attitude TV

Artwork in the App

Some of the graphics, displayed on the Japanese version

The coins and the gems in the iPhone app were created by Jessica Prisbrey, who is soon to join the family, but joined the business last year. The ironic thing was that the gold kiwi and the silver fern which appear on the coins are New Zealand symbols, while Jessica is a native of Utah, USA. We had to send back a few times, saying “No a kiwi doesn’t really look like that!” Fortunately she didn’t take it personally and we have the great results you see today, along with the eight original gems, and another fourteen to be seen soon. You can see more of Jessica’s work here on the website, as she designed this. Jessica also has a deviant art site, which is where she and William first met over three years ago.

So you see it is definitely a family affair!

In another post I will talk about the localisation process and all the friends and colleagues we dragged in to help with that.

Teaching Tips

Dr_Rogo — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 01:28:09 +0000

Rogo puzzles appeal to a wide range of ages. Here are some great ideas on how to use Rogo in the classroom. No doubt imaginative teachers will think up many more. You will need to be conversant with Rogo puzzles before some of the following ideas will resonate. If you would like to share your ideas, either add them as a comment to this blog, or email them to v...@rogopuzzle.co.nz.

Exercises using Rogo puzzles as they are

Reward activities for when pupils have completed their work.
Laminate a set and include a whiteboard pen to use in the Maths activity box.
Homework exercises, with or without the “best” score provided.
Team competitions.
Rogo installed on iPods or iPads for pupils to play on. (Note that there is an educational discount for the Rogo app.)

Changes to Rogo puzzles:

How many routes can students find that give a specific total (less than the Best!)
What is the smallest score they can achieve with a legitimate route of the correct length?
Give different length routes for pupils to try out on the same grid.
Don’t give the “Best” or “Gold” and make it a competition to see who can get the highest score.
Designate an additional forbidden square, and see if it alters the solution.
Allow drawing over forbidden squares.
Change the numbers to fractions, decimals or even algebraic expressions.

Make your own Rogos

Teachers can easily make their own Rogo-type puzzles.
Note that finding the actual best route can be problematic, and making sure a Rogo puzzle has suitable distracters is also difficult. However for a quick exercise on the board, involving counting and adding, a made-up Rogo has great appeal. The class can help to devise the board at the start of the exercise.

Students make Rogo-type puzzles for each other.
Vote on which is the hardest, which is the most fun, which is the most attractive to look at…

Students discover that it can be difficult to know when they have reached the optimal solution.
Get students to make Rogo-type puzzles suitable for younger children, using pictures rather than numbers, and pictures on the forbidden squares. Use a theme of collecting flowers, coins, eggs, treasure or starfish, for instance.

(In time the Rogo website will have the facility for you to submit your devised Rogo puzzles for solving and evaluation.)

A Rogo shown as a bughunt

Explorations and creative responses

These more divergent ideas may be more suited for when pupils have had experience in solving Rogo puzzles and understand some of the structural elements.

Enumeration

Using a simple Rogo, get students to enumerate all possible routes.
Get students to write an algorithm that will make it possible to list every possible route.
See if students can generalise their enumeration method to a larger number of routes.

Heuristics

What process do they use to solve a Rogo?
Come up with a set of steps which will help them to solve a new Rogo puzzle.
Could these be used to program a computer to solve a Rogo puzzle?
How do you know when to stop?
(There will be more about heuristics in a later blog.)

Route shapes

For a certain route length, what shaped routes are possible? This leads to concepts of symmetry, reflection and rotation.
How could you classify each of the route shapes?
Is there a rule that can be used to generalise how many shapes there are?

Forbidden squares

For a certain size grid, which patterns of black squares are of practical use? (For example a black square one away for the corner makes the corner square unattainable.)
Does this differ depending on the length of the route?

Difficulty

Explore what elements of a Rogo make it easier or more difficult to solve. A later blog will discuss the twelve elements we have identified and are exploring.
Get a set of Rogo puzzles and get each student to time themselves solving them. Collect the data and use it for a statistical investigation. How would you present this data? Is the variation in time taken between people more or less than the variation among the different puzzles. This could be used to hypothesise what makes some Rogos more difficult than others.
Get the class to postulate questions and then work out ways to explore them. For example, how dense should the numbers and squares be for a satisfactory Rogo? Does symmetry play a part in solving the puzzle. What is the relationship between difficulty and fun?

Imaginative settings

Make up stories that would be solved by a Rogo puzzle. For example, shopping or holidaying among tourist attractions.

Rogaining and the Travelling Salesperson Problem(TSP)

Rogo has its roots in a sport called Rogaining, which involves problem solving, strategy and navigation. A mini Rogaine could be devised in the school playground, perhaps formatted as a Rogo.

Students may like to explore the TSP and its historical background. Links are provided in this website. A previous blog explained the links between Rogo and the fascinating subject of Operations Research, which is becoming increasingly used in business in the area of Analytics.

Potential for learning

Rogo has enormous potential to help students of all ages develop numeracy and problem-solving skills. Math teachers are encouraged to use games to liven up the classroom and enable learning.

Tell us your great ideas and successes and we will compile this for other teachers.

We love AppAnnie

Dr_Rogo — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:51:14 +0000

It is nearly a month now since our little Rogo puzzle app was launched into the big wide world, and like all good parents we have watched her progress closely. Each sale is precious to us, and every drop in rank a cause for concern. Our greatest ally in this parenting adventure has been – not iTunes Connect (even though they are the ones that collect the money) – but AppAnnie. AppAnnie is an “App Nanny” that looks after your apps for you and provides information to anyone about all the apps in all the app stores.

Even while Rogo was still being created we watched the app store to see how her future playmates, and dare I say, competitors, were faring. AppAnnie was invaluable for this as well. Anyone can see the graphs showing the rank history of any app they are interested in, in any store they are interested in. We enjoyed watching Matt Rix’s success with Trainyard, back in October.

Historical ranks for Trainyard on the US store

The Top 5 Matrix gives a range of overviews by country or by category for the day of your choosing. We were pretty excited for Rogo to appear in this as the top Educational Game in New Zealand.

The Top 5 matrix for Educational Games - See Rogo!

You can also see what was the highest rank an app has achieved in each of the stores and each of the categories. These are Rogo’s “baby photos” and available in the public domain.

But AppAnnie has a more personal service for app developers. Each night AppAnnie collects the sales figures for Rogo from iTunes Connect, and sends a report. She puts all the reviews into one place (whereas on iTunes Connect you have to check each store).

Some recent reviews for Rogo. All five star!

AppAnnie tells you where your apps are being featured.

Rogo is Hot in sixteen places.

My personal favourite is AppAnnie’s breakdown of sales by store in a very colourful format. (We removed the numbers to preserve Rogo’s modesty).

Graph of Rogo sales by country

All this is provided at no cost, though you do provide AppAnnie access to your sales data. For any anxious new developer, watching the progress of their infant app, it is invaluable. For anyone interested in purchasing apps, it is a way of finding out what is hot in, say, Botswana! And for mathematics and statistics teachers it provides some interesting instances of data representation, and data for analysis.

Thanks AppAnnie – the Rogo team loves you!

Rogo and O.R.

Dr_Rogo — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:02:42 +0000

This is the first blog entry to talk about where Rogo comes from. It has two origins – Rogaining, and Operations Research. Last week I talked about Rogaining, so today it will be Operations Research.

Dr Rogo discovers Operations Research

First, a little personal history. I loved mathematics at school and liked problem solving and puzzles (though Sudoku was not yet around), so when in the final section of an introductory Economics College course I was introduced to Operations Research, or Operational Research as it used to be called in New Zealand, it was love at first sight. I couldn’t believe my luck at finding a subject that used mathematics to solve problems in the real world, that related to people. Back then there were no personal computers, so we did more computation by calculator, and simulation was onerous, but rather fun. I changed my major, and now have a PhD in Management Science (which is yet another name commonly used for Operations Research.) I now teach Management Science at the University of Canterbury, along with the other inventor of Rogo.

Operations Research (OR) has incredibly diverse applications. As I write, the tangled mess of timetables resulting from extreme weather in Europe is being untangled. Each plane and crew member needs to get back into their correct slot as quickly as possible – and there are also the passengers to think of! Scheduling flight crews is a complex problem, with astronomically large possible combinations, which may or may not be feasible. This would be much simpler if money were no object – you could have crew and planes sitting around waiting for emergencies. But it is always a trade off between cost and convenience. Often the objective of an OR problem is to minimise cost, while obeying a multitude of constraints or rules.

The Travelling Salesperson Problem

Okay, this is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with Rogo? Well there is an area of OR which is called the Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP). The classic scenario is that you have a travelling salesperson who has certain destinations that must be visited, and they wish to do it in the minimum amount of time or distance, and then return to their starting point. This problem should sound familiar to Christmas shoppers, sporting mums, courier drivers… The interesting thing is that it is surprisingly hard. If you have 5 destinations, and wish to visit them all, then there are 12 possible routes that take you to all of them. For those of you who are interested, the formula for this is (n-1)!/2. So for 5 destinations the number of routes is 4 x 3 x 2 x 1/2. This is fine for very few destinations, but the number of possibilities gets big REALLY fast. If you have 10 destinations, then there are over 180,000 possible routes. You can read much more about TSP at this excellent site.

Rogo is a puzzle based on the TSP

Rogo is a special case of the TSP. To start with, you are limited in the distance you can travel by the number of steps or squares you can use. Secondly you can’t go to all the destinations, so you need to choose which ones to visit. Thus it is a “subset selection” TSP. And the destinations have different reward values (the numbers in the squares), so it is a “Prize-collecting, subset selection TSP.” In order to make it more fun and easier to print, we decided to put it on a rectilinear grid. (A set of squares). This makes it easier to count how far apart the different rewards are, but also can make it a little deceptive. Things can look further apart or closer than they really are, and there are multiple routes of exactly the same length. Many of our cities are pretty close to being rectilinear grids. (Christchurch, NZ within the central Four Avenues is a neat grid, though the earthquake repairs have compromised this for a while.)

Believe it or not, the computer program that solves each Rogo puzzle that is devised, is quite a tricky little thing, written by Dr Shane Dye. We can only solve fairly small Rogos, and occasionally if I give it a difficult one, my poor laptop overheats and shuts down. Another interesting aspect is that a problem that is difficult for our computer algorithm could well be trivial for humans, and vice versa.

This was a brief introduction to the relationship between OR and Rogo. Remember to tell your friends about it. There is much more to come, both in the blog and in Rogo.

Week 2 – The Ride Continues

Dr_Rogo — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:01:49 +0000

Is it really only two weeks since Rogo hit the app store? There have been so many highs and lows in the time that it seems like much longer. It is still difficult to concentrate on much else.
There was an article about the game in the Sunday Star times, and one in the University of Canterbury Chronicle on Monday and then one in the Christchurch Mail on Wednesday. Each of them has the same photo of Bruce, Nicola (me) and Shane wearing our Rogo T-shirts and brandishing our iPods loaded with Rogo at the camera. There was a little spike in sales on Sunday as a result.
My sister-in-law in the US has a lot of Facebook friends and has kindly told them about Rogo for us, and I am contacting at least three people a day to tell them about our exciting new game. It is uphill work, but we feel we just need to build critical mass, and then…
Our Youtube video is getting lots of views, which we hope will translate into sales.
We stayed at the top of the Educational games in New Zealand for the week, and spent most of the time in the top 10 puzzle games.
The booklets of puzzles for Cobham Intermediate school have been printed, and will go on sale today, along with their survival kits. The proceeds will help take their “Future Problem Solving” team to the United States for a competition in the middle of next year. The children have been using paper Rogo puzzles in the classroom and are very keen on them.

View from Checkpoint 56 over Christchurch city on the Twilight Rogaine

Nicola and Mark (Dr Rogo and Rogoman) took part in a Rogaine on the Port Hills this week, and had a wonderful time enjoying views of Christchurch and Lyttleton harbour, in between searching for checkpoints and solving cryptic clues. We got back on time, which can be a challenge for us, and scored a modest 600 points. The winning team scored about 1500! They must have run the whole three hours. Thanks Tim and the team for organising such a fun event.

We had hoped that Rogo might have gained a little more momentum before Christmas so we could be another Doodle Jump! But we are happy that we are gradually getting the app out there, and confident that its quality will shine through. After a little break we are now developing the website further, preparing the upgrade for release in January, and contacting publishers regarding a book.

First week roller-coaster ride

Dr_Rogo — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:23:46 +0000

Friday 10 December 2010
It’s a week today that we got word that our App, Rogo was approved for sale in the app store.
And what a week it has been.
After the initial excitement, we started by emailing all our friends to let them know the happy news, and encourage them to buy Rogo.
Then on Saturday and Sunday we attended an iDev Conference at Jade Software. It was the first of its kind in New Zealand, and a fantastic way to enter the world of iOS development and meet lots of very nice people. And it was an opportunity to spread the word on Rogo. Consequently our sales on Saturday and Sunday were pretty good too.

The app store app became my favourite thing to look at. There is something pretty magic about seeing our own icon in the list of Game categories.
Rogo has been top Educational Game in New Zealand from the time we launched, except for a day when Dora’s Christmas bumped us out.

The week has been one of obsession and highs and lows. Most of the time has been taken up with emailing people and review sites, sending out Promo codes and monitoring iTunes Connect and AppAnnie to see how we are doing.

The University of Canterbury sent out a media release and has a story on the website, to which we have been directing people. And we have a Youtube video, that has been getting about 30 hits a day. We heard on Friday that the Sunday Star Times is planning an article this weekend.
A highlight was getting a blog mention by Mike Trick, who is probably the main Operations Research blogger. This was thanks to Hamish Waterer who had seen our presentation at the ORSNZ conference the previous Tuesday.
We needed reviews in the USA app store, and luckily we know some people with rellies in the states, who own iPhones and iPod touches. We still don’t have quite enough though. We also asked our translator, Rocky, to help us get a review in China and Japan.
Dan from iPhonewzealand was at the iDev and was quite taken with Rogo. He then went on to write an extremely thorough review.
We are also working with Cobham Intermediate, who are fundraising tos end a team of five pupils and two teachers to the Future Problem-Solving in the US . We are providing 400 Rogo puzzle books for them to sell with all the proceeds to go to their travel fund.
And we were mentioned as “Rogaining on the couch” in a Rogaining newsletter this week. Thanks!