John McLear's School Technology » primary games arena

Interactive Educational Volcano Games

Admin Admin — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:05:40 +0000

I have submitted some volcano games to Primary Games Arena. Click here to see a list of Flash Volcano Games that can be used in Primary School lessons and home. I was hoping I could have a widget wrote today that would include all the games inline on this blog post but I keep getting distracted by people wanting to use my laptop to check their flights are still flying.

The games are here.

Tim Rylands presentation at Games Based Learning

Admin Admin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:09:36 +0000

Tim is a great presenter, sit back end enjoy.

Usually when we talk about Games based learning we expect that children will be the consumers of the game, not the creators. With more creativity coming into the new primary curriculum it will be interesting to see how classrooms:

Become creative
Decide on a target audience for their creations
Publish their creativity
Get assessed on their creative outpu

I hope that within the next 5 years pupils will be making their own games of a high enough quality and engagement for us to share on Primary Games Arena

[ #gbl10 ]: The National Gaming Curriculum: new media literacies [Part 2] (edu.blogs.com)
10 game influential people on Twitter (deangroom.wordpress.com)

Drag and drop in flash objects on android

Admin Admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:12:00 +0000

Does anyone know if its possible to drag and drop in flash on android. I want to play a flash game on my phone and it appears that the click and drag functionality doesn’t exist or isn’t supported?

Am I missing something?

The HTC Hero comes shipped with Flash Lite, sound and video works although some games are a bit too heavy for the graphics processor to handle.

Safe Curriculum games plugin / widget for WordPress & WPMU

Admin Admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:18:00 +0000

Description:

Put the top 5 curriculum games from Primary Games Arena onto your blog.

Installation:

Download from here
Unzip to wp-contents/plugins
Activate site wide (In plugins)
Log into wp-admin
Click Appearance > Widgets
Drag the widget onto your sidebar

Example:

When is Primary Games Arena used?

Admin Admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:05:00 +0000

As part of Primary Technology’s commitment to transparency we have been evaluating our website usage statistics and have decided to release this interesting finding. Primary Games Arena is a site for Primary School pupils to learn while playing games. What % of total hits do you think come outside of school hours? Lets say from 4pm to 8am.

These figures only include UK visitors (to ensure accuracy of findings).

I bet that gets a few brains thinking.. PS the % of learning is not the amount of learning, it’s the amount of visits to the site. Primary / School Email is used 67% during the school day and the other 33% outside of school hours.

Primary Games Arena is now up

Admin Admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:06:00 +0000

Iv’e finished my work on Primary Games Arena. We still have a few more tweeks to do that Adam and Chris will be doing over the next week or so. Quite a lot of games are now up so go ahead and enjoy these Primary Games.

Project Natal Games

Admin Admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:54:00 +0000

I have been following the stuff about Project Natal and it looks like it could be really good for education.

I will try to summarize project Natal:

Move your whole body instead of your fingers. It has facial/sound recognition. I love how interactive project natal is and that makes it perfect for educational use.

I have 2 problems with Natal:

1) it requies an xbox360. By default schools assume an xbox360 is an arcade gaming console so the main function is gaming.

2) I don’t know how to code/develop games for Xbox 360 (I’m hoping that flash games will be playable as most educational games are flash based).

There needs to be a discussion into integrating this new type of full body control into new games. The functions and methods need to be simply integrated into existing resources. For example, if you have an old flash game that is just point + click. How does this new control type interface with that? Can you point at an object or do you have to slap it? what is a click, what isn’t? What is a drag/drop & What isn’t? How do we storage faces for facial recognition? Does this need to be part of the Windows Live login process? In which case will all pupils need a live account?

In an ideal world it would be open source but thats not going to happen. I will keep my ears to the ground and report back

Project Natal Video available here

As a side note, just imagine if the sensor comes out for vista or xp, how amazing would that be? This type of interactivity with your OS with full application support would make my brain drool.

I see this as being the future so I will be asking the guys at Primary Tech to look into it