Friday, September 21, 2012

Fun On Friday #150: Write your own adventure

I've written before about text based adventure games (see for example Fun On Friday #89: A maze of twisty games all alike) but thanks to a Tweet from Digital Katie, I've just discovered the Text Adventures website where you can "Create, play and share text adventure games".

It's brilliant. You can play online or download a Windows application and play offline. If you create your own game, you can make it public and let anyone play it or keep it unlisted and just share it with people you choose.

There is also an Education page with suggestions, examples and help for teachers who want to use Interactive Fiction with students.

I'll try to have a go at creating a game soon and share it here. Have you already created a game or have you tried this sort of thing with a class?

Thursday, September 20, 2012

TMSLF12: First session.

Live capture blog from TeachMeet SLF 2012.

Drew Burrett - Physics teacher. Crowd sourced, open source text books. Brilliant idea. Physicists are doing it, why can't {insert subject/level of choice here} teachers do it too? See online presentation for more details.

Nick Hood - The motivators of games design applied in the classroom. Described how he got a difficult class motivated and involved. I liked that he gave the badges for things but that although the "badges" were just a number in a spreadsheet, they still motivated! Recommended watching the TED Talk on motivators of games design - I think it was this one:


Ian Hallahan - Recommended the Dyslexia Scotland website for great resources.

(Not a presentation, but just because he could, Neil Winton showed how to use Diigo to take screenshots of whole web pages.)

I realise this is a bit light on detail, but you should still be able to access the video feed and watch the recording of the presentations.