Archive for the ‘website’ Category
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1
Jun
2009
It’s Game Time!
Well, our game is basically finished! We only have one more interview video to post after I get the written approval from the students’ mother! To play, navigate to: http://juliemcleod.org/1destination
As with any project that I tackle for the first time, the game surpassed my expectations in some ways and in other ways, I feel we still have so much work to do. Yet, we are wrapping up the school year and have run out of time. When we did our final reflective interview for the year, many of the students noted this work as particularly engaging yet challenging. Jackpot! 
23
May
2009
1 Destination
The students voted on a title for our game: 1 Destination. With every decision, there are usually a few kids who grumble. I try to remind them that they all chose to accept the decisions of others and move on and that they would not be getting their way on everything. So far, that has seemed to work.
Students are also beginning work on their videos which introduce the problems to the players. They are using the xtranormal site where I recorded the newscast of the plane crash for their example beginning. We are just using the free portion so we have some limitations. One limitation is that the videos can only have 2 characters. So, any scene that the students wrote with more than 2 characters has to be broken into pieces or changed. That hasn’t seemed to bother the kids though. One issue I’m trying to resolve is the background on the video. Xtranormal only has backgrounds that show some type of civilization. Makes sense for most videos, but ours needs to be a deserted island! So, we are using the green screen and I’m going to spend some time this weekend to see if I can figure out how to replace the green screen with a background of our choice. I would LOVE to use a student drawing as the background. We’ll see!
One group is working on how the website will look online and how the players will interact. The example I had created last weekend really got them thinking. They went in a totally different direction though. I was thinking that we would basically walk the players through our storyline sequentially. The group wanted it set up much more like a website with random access to the game and other interesting information. They drew pictures with their thoughts about each web page — just like professional web designers do! Here are their pictures:
Title Page for the game
This would be the title page or the splash page. The students were in the process of voting on the title so on each page, the group just wrote “Title”. The big box says “Play if you dare!”. When you click on it, you go to the game.
Game page using Island Map
The game page is a map of the island. There will be hotspots that have the four problems that the players need to help solve. They will also have a “Clue Mountain” where the players can get hints.
Manhattan Page
Directly underneath the title, there are four links that players can visit: Manhattan, News, Game and Interviews. This is the Manhattan page. It will tell about all the strange coincidences between Manhattan Island and our crazy island.
News Page
This is the News page which will have links to the news stories on Manhattan island.
Interviews page
This is where they would like to have the video clips of the character interviews we did in class. I’ll have to get permission from the students parents though. We’ll see how that goes.
Overall, I think they are doing an excellent job!