Saturday, February 5, 2011

Justin's Game for Kids

So this week, we got a couple of iPads to use for the Computers in Education classes that I teach along with others and I am fascinated by the number of educational apps. My 5 year old, and even my 18 month old have enjoyed looking at some of the apps that I downloaded.

So for my scratch project I changed my mind and made a little kids game to hear the name of a few shapes. So here is my project. It was fun thinking about what I could do with the game.




Learn more about this project

Ultimately I decided to keep it pretty basic and I figured out how to make the shapes rotate, change colors, get bigger, and play a recording of the name of the sound. I had to figure out a few ways to reuse the scripts, sprites and the recordings. I am figuring out how to do some of them, but I am sure there are better ways to do this. Hopefully I can continue to do more on this as it has been pretty fun.

In answer the Dr. Peppler's question of what's new about new media, and is this new, the answer for me is a resounding YES!!! One thing that is amazing about new media is the speed of dissemination. I just created and finished this scratch game, and within a few minutes I can upload it to MIT's site, get and embed code and put it on a blog or website. The I can post the embed code or share it with people all over the globe and they could play my game within just a few minutes. In other words, I can make a game or program for free and share it with people all over for free. I am reminded of a talk I heard by Dr. David Wiley, professor at BYU and proponent of Open Educational Resources. Dr. Wiley talked about a time when we realized that a physical calculator can be used by one person at a time, but if he made an online calculator, it could be accessed by millions of people at the same time for free. I think that is a very interesting idea and this is kind of a similar situation. This kind of thing was not possible more than just a few years ago.

PS my kids are asleep, but I will have to do some usability testing on this game tomorrow to see how they like it :)

4 comments:

  1. Hi Justin,

    I really like your game. Can it really work on the iPad?? I also agree with what you say about the immediateness of the access. People can access our projects immediately. I find that to be another feature of New Media...being available anywhere.

    Thanks for the post!
    Maria

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  2. Agreed! Great project and I think the ease of sharing/creating/contributing/distributing is really important in new media.

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  3. I love that you made this game with your child. I think that the amount of work that it takes to create something and the fact that it was so lovingly created is wonderful!

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  4. Ditto, Charlene! I think the best thing about this class (so far) has been that (those of us with children) can have them join us in the learning fun! :)

    Anyway, love that you were inspired by your iPad and included your kiddos! Love it! I agree with you about the accessibility - I posed mine on Facebook to let everyone know about MITs Scratch! I wonder how many of them will actually go there, now!?! Anyway, accessibility is a great viewpoint to this question - great! ;)

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