Required employee training is a reality of corporate life. It usually isn't fun and getting busy people through it in a timely manner can be a challenging and thankless task.

How do you effectively promote self-directed skills training in an office environment? One method is to institute some friendly competition.

The Leaderboard Marquee is, on the surface, a simple marquee with a blend of hand-crafted natural materials and lo-fi retro gaming aesthetics. The marquee could, technically, display anything that fits into an 8x42 pixel grid. In this case the grid rotates through, in twinkling glory, the high scores of employees who are competing to earn the most points in an online training platform.

Leveraging the screen-scraper-as-an-API methodology, scores are pulled from the training software via a wifi-connected microcontroller. Once that information has been processed into pixel data with the help of a custom pixel font, the microcontroller animates it on the 336 individually addressable LEDs.

The need for an employee training leader board has since passed. We are in the process of repurposing the marquee to function as ambient lighting displaying an implementation of Conway's Game of Life.

This is in anticipation of making a new LED display, this time with triangular pixels displaying a triangular version of the Game of Life. We're interested in exploring how the geometry changes the resulting animation and how tweaking the rules of the game play into it. For instance, how does one determine the thresholds for flipping a cell from dead to living and vice versa?