Adventure Author

Answering some questions about fridge magnets

I have been reading through the comments you have all been making on the software. It's really great to have your input - thank you all!

Gail left some good questions so I thought it migh be useful to answer them here in case a few people ave been wondering.

"Wow this has really developed since last we saw it. So stimulating and motivating for the kids. How often do we find they think they have nothing to say . . . Judy Martin's idea of a word bank would be a great way of to engage non english speaking background kids who suffer from a deprived language background. Are the kids talking about what they are doing with teacher and others as thy construct and collate using their fridge magnets? or do they work alone on their story. What is the audience? Just the teacher or other students? Stars are a good idea but only from teacher?? Feedback from peers is very powerful is this incorporated? Will continue to follow on both sites. Can't wait to read more."

• It's really important for the kids to discuss their ideas with each other and the teacher as they use the magnet, and before and after! Miss Collins has been doing a lot of planning work with them away from the computer.
• They write individual games but share ideas and feedback from each other.
• The audience for the games are other pupils plus teacher and maybe parents. The audience for the fridge magnets is mostly the pupil himself, although it will be useful for the teacher. If we had more time we would make a collaborative version of the magnets so kids could share ideas. I had a very good student project relating to this last year, but the physical constraints about equipment lead us to focus on a stand alone version in this project.
• The stars are now for the kid to mark his own favourite idea. We didn't do the teacher stars in the end.

Updated creativity diagram

 As I am preparing a talk on the creativity angle of our work, I decided to put the updated set of diagrams about creativity online. Antonios, I have taken into account your comments about emotions. Judy, I have replied to your comment on the previous post.

Download CreativityDiagrams.pdf if you want to see the full set: emotons, peer support, teacher support, AA support, cognition and metacognition. As ever, comments welcome!

Satisfied fridge magnet customers

As you may have been reading from the Campie School blog, the pupils are doing great work on their games and story lines. Cathrin and I visited yesterday to show them some more features of the Conversation Writer: how to add actions and how to do conditions. Cathrin showed them more of her example story, much to the delight of the kids who got to meet the famous Cedric Bear. She promised to tell you about that soon, so I will leave it to her. However, I feel I must document this testament to Keiron's fabulous Fridge Magnets (a feature in our software which helps kids record their game ideas). After seeing Cathrin demo how to make conversations, a boy was trying to decide what should happen in the conversation. Inspiration struck - he opened the fridge magnets feature, retrieved his magnet box and eagerly read his ideas from last time. "Thank God I've got they fridge magnets" he said with heartfelt sincerity.

You may have noticed the Campie pupils' blog comments about the fridge magnets. We also gathered some questionnaire data. Here are some highlights:

• I thought it was really fun for mapping ideas
• Very helpful and a good place to store ideas
• I think it will help you remember stuff that you would normally forget

and my personal favourite:

• It's very cool! it helps you get all the ideas you have bubbling in you brain out

But let's not get too carried away because:

• It was OK although not the best thing we have done so far

(To be honest, he's right! :-) )

In terms of usability, the magnets seemed to be pretty good on this first version. Very few children had any suggestions for improvements, except to enable them to type longer ideas.

This is an example magnet board from a pupil:

Thanks Adventure Author!

I had a great time visiting the Adventure Author team and Campie Primary School. Thanks everyone for making me so welcome! I was very impressed with the latest developments in the Adventure Author tool. The conversation writer is fantastic (and a huge improvement on the built-in conversation tool in NWN2). It makes it very intuitive and straightforward for young people to create interactive conversations, which is no mean feat! The fridge magnet tool is a great new way for game designers to record and organise their ideas. It is lovely to look at, but the full power of it really only came to my attention when I watched the P7 children in Miss Collins’ class coming up with idea after idea when using it. I saw children who had told me minutes before that they had no ideas for their games adding thoughts about great plot lines, interesting characters and exciting quests. It’s clearly an excellent tool for supporting children in organising and expanding on the ideas they have in an informal, non-threatening and enjoyable way. I hope to be able to come back and see how the class (who took to game creation like ducks to water) are progressing towards the end of the project.

NWN - a hit in the English department

Kelly Walker asked her S2 pupils at Braeview High School what they thought of working with NWN in their English lessons (see our article about Kelly's fantasy genre project), and it would seem that the project was quite a hit: "I think that Neverwinter Nights has helped me with my writing. One of the things I enjoyed the most was making the map and adding objects and terrain in. I also liked when I made the conversations. The whole thing in my eyes was a complete success," said Blair D. Read on for further comments from the pupils about literacy, learning and creativity . . .

Fridge magnets "lucky dip" feature - can you help?

As well as the children creating their own ideas within the fridge magnets, we would like to build in a "lucky dip" feature that would offer a randomly generated suggestion that might help inspire the creative process. Can you help? We would love to receive suggestions for generic game or story ideas under any of the magnet headings - plot, character, setting, quests, plot items, etc. Please use the comment facility below to add your ideas and help us make the fridge magnet tool even more creatively inspiring. Thank you!

Cedric's Specs: my maiden flight with the fridge magnets

Keiron supervised me in my maiden flight with the fridge magnets yesterday and I had a ball! The touchy-feely nature of them makes them very tempting to play with, and the ease of use meant I could quickly collect and organise ideas for my new game - Cedric's Specs, about a short-sighted wombat who keeps losing crucial items and needs the player's help to retrieve them (no battles and bloodshed for me, this is a truly girlie game plan!). So how did it all go . . . ?

Creativity diagram (first draft)

First version of creativity diagram.