MissionMaker, Immersive Education’s amazing game-creation tool has been exercising my imagination a good deal over recent weeks. Last week we hosted and led a NAGTY event to give G&T students an introduction to the software. The feedback from the students was fantastic. In a single-day session, they implemented some really creative ideas in their games. During the Autumn Term, we are running an extended project with the software with a group from Our Lady and St. Chad’s RC School. I’ve also started work on a game in MissionMaker for use during our primary Adventure Game theme day; here’s the current version of the Maths part of the adventure:

• Maths Game (Right-click and “Save As”) - can only be opened from within MissionMaker.

(Later in the year, Immersive are planning to release a free player application which will allow anyone to play MissionMaker games, whether or not they have the game creation tool. You can find some examples of games created by students on this MissionMaker blog from Shropshire Local Authority).

All this means that I’ve been acquainting myself in detail with the joys (and occasional frustrations) of working with the software. MissionMaker is still a beta (development) product at the moment, but the core functionality is implemented beautifully. I have no doubt that the full production release will tidy up and enhance those features that are still a little rough-around-the-edges.

For those of you in schools and centres who have access to the current beta release, here’s a little trick I found!

Adding multiple triggers for an event

During our initial training at the CLC with the team from Immersive we were shown how to add multiple actions to a rule by opening an existing rule from the “My Game” menu and holding down the shift key while clicking on the arrow for another Action to associate it with the same trigger. This can save a huge amount of time and energy.

In the current beta version of MissionMaker there is no direct way to have multiple triggers for an action i.e. rules which say “the player must complete TASK A and TASK B to activate ACTION C”. This sort of rule-making allows the game-creator to implement far more complex and challenging puzzles. There is a scoring mechanism in MissionMaker that can accommodate some of this functionality - i.e. TASK A adds 100 to the score, TASK B adds 100 to the score and ACTION C occurs when the player has 200 points. The problem with this is that the player is completely aware of the progress they are making towards the goal; they see their score rise as the tasks are completed. This is a particular problem for a puzzle which involves positioning objects in trigger volumes, as the player can walk through the trigger volumes (holding the object in front of them) until they see their score increase.

I wondered if there was a work-around that would allow multiple triggers to be implemented in a manner that is completely hidden from the player. Read more

The Summer Holiday programme at the City Learning Centre is now in full-swing. We have led sessions as part of Deansfield High’s Gifted and Talented Transition project, based on the theme of Adaptation and Extinction; students from Y6 - Y9 created an animated documentary film based upon the fauna and flora of a fictional set of undiscovered islands.

This week, the City Learning Centre has run a series of G&T activities in collaboration with NAGTY. On Monday, Key Stage 3 students experienced MissionMaker, Immersive Education’s remarkable game-creation tool. Yesterday, Key Stage 2 students participated in a one day Space Camp of rocket-building, designing Mars Landers and learning about space exploration. Feedback from both events was extremely positive. Tomorrow, we host a Key Stage 2 Maths in Motion day; a really challenging learning experience in the context of Formula One Racing.

I’ve written on the blog before about the use of newsfeeds (see ‘Working with RSS Feeds‘). As the internet expands with more sites, and, more importantly, more interesting sites, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay up to date with the latest news and additions on your favourite websites. Newsfeeds allow you to receive syndicated content from around the web, so when a new piece of news or piece of content is added to a site, you can be notified automatically without having to visit each site in turn to check. You may have noticed icons like this - or - popping up on websites; the RSS or feed symbol (or sometimes an ‘XML’ or simple ‘newsfeed’ link) tells you that a feed is available. (For more details see ‘Working with RSS Feeds‘).

FeederReader (www.feederreader.com) is a great piece of software that allows you to receive newsfeeds on a PDA (PocketPC). This is possibly even more useful on a PDA than on a desktop PC, as some websites render improperly on the PocketPC, but a newsfeed is an unstyled piece of content made up of text and images. FeederReader also allows the user to receive files attached to a newsfeed item; notably audio files in the form of podcasts. A free version of FeederReader, limited to monitoring a maximum of eight feeds at a time, is available to download from the website.

In this article, I want to look at:

• How to use FeederReader to receive newsfeeds and podcasts
• Some ideas for use of newsfeeds and podcasts in education

Read more

One of the more time-consuming projects we’ve been involved in recently is the development of new websites for two of our partner primary schools. A website design service was offered to the CLC contacts and was rapidly snapped up by both Green Acres Primary School and Bushbury Hill Primary School. The site for Bushbury Hill is now complete at www.bushburyhillprimary.org.uk; the site for Green Acres is nearing completion.

I’ve been developing websites for education for some time now, but these new sites are the first I’ve worked on where I’ve paid full attention to one of the “hot topics” of web design at the moment - web accessibility.

So what is web accessibility? Web accessibility means that “people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web” (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php). Visitors with disabilities have as much right to access the information on the Internet as anybody else. It is therefore the responsibility of web-designers to create webpages that are accessible to these visitors.

Accessible websites are well-structured. They have a clear distinction between the navigational zones of the design and content. Links are clear. The organisation of pages and the relationships between them is immediately obvious. It is easy to find your way to the homepage of the site.

I hope that all of my previous sites meet these criteria. However, some of the key elements of a truly accessible site may not be immediately obvious to non-disabled visitors surfing the web using the traditional medium of a PC/Mac, web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) and mouse.

How do different groups of disabled visitors navigate around the Web?

• Visitors with sight difficulties may surf the Web with screen-reading software that reads webpages to them using a synthesized voice.
• Visitors with motor difficulties may be unable to use a mouse to point-and click.

How do we make sites accessible to these visitors? Read more