John McLear

Top 5 Edu games of 2010

Posted on December 27, 2010December 27, 2010 by primaryt

A good educational game isn’t a linear process, a good game engages children to a point where the game itself becomes a consumable and desirable entity away from the influence of teachers & educators. A lot of game creators miss this point, pupils therefore learn to do and not to think. This is detrimental to learning in my opinion and it only encourages assessment models that don’t truly reflect a pupils ability to be a good citizen. We should never forget that no matter how we dress it up, Multiple choice tests are not fun and single choice is the opposite of fun.

In 2010 due to an influx of game creation tools educators began thinking about how they could create games and this is great but it increased the amount of hot air single choice, linear games to a new all time high. 5 games this year really set themselves apart from the hot air that was released, here they are:

Admongo

Admongo is a side scroller designed to teach kids to be aware of marketing and advertisements. Consumerism is a huge driving force in today’s conflicts and I believe we need to be mindful of why we consume certain things.

Jet Ski Addition

This game is great because it encourages competitive learning.

Mystery Island

Mystery Island gives pupils the ability to find their own way through a world and encourages adventuring whilst solving micro problems by delivering packages. This is probably my personal least favourite yet it is one the most popular games with kids so I thought I’d throw it in!

Geosense

I’m not gonna lie, this game sucks you in, prepare to waste a good 15 minutes increasing your knowledge of locations on the Earth.

Light Bot

Pick your way to solve the control problem. This game teaches the logic behind control and movement. It is actually quite linear but it requires strategic thinking and planning. Light Bot is way more fun than multiple choice and that’s why I like it 🙂

Hide images from div if they don’t fit

Posted on December 24, 2010December 25, 2010 by John McLear

The title of this article is horribly lame but it’s what (after a few beers) I appear to have Google’d for.. Basically you have a div, 800px wide and you have 16 images, all 100px wide and you want to only leave 8 images in the active dom. I bet you are thinking.. Yea just use

overflow:hidden

.. Sure.. But you can still tab to the images and that sucks if you are making a TV website where the users may be using a remote control…

So here’s how I did it.. Using javascript..

Set an incremental id value on each image, IE img
```
id=image1
```
… image2, image3 etc.
Get width of div
Divide width by amount of px.
Now you have total amount of objects you can show
For each of the 16 images if the amount of images available is less than 16 then set it to
```
display:inline;
```
else set it to
```
display:none;
```

Display none stops the object from existing on the screen what so ever.. It’s not hidden so you can’t tab to it.. This also works with divs that can be resized.. What you do is listen for resize, when a resize event is triggered get the new div width and run the function to hide/display the images..

If you know a better/cleaner way of doing this then please let me know 🙂

Game teaches kids to be critical of advertising

Posted on December 22, 2010December 24, 2010 by John McLear

Admongo is a game by the US Federal trade commission that “aims to educate tweens (kids ages 8 to 12) about advertising so they can become more discerning consumers of information. The goal of the campaign is to boost advertising literacy by…”

I think this is a great idea because advertising is becoming more and more a part of daily life.

The game is side scrolling and plays pretty nice, it is obviously a linear game with coins thrown in for fun. It’s a pretty high quality game and good to see good games with what I think is a positive thing to be teaching young people.

Click here to play Admongo on Primary Games Arena

Exploring Basic Economics & Social Skills in Tween Virtual World Woozworld (insidesocialgames.com)

3 font APIs and a font stack generator

Posted on December 22, 2010April 6, 2012 by John McLear

So you want to change the font on your website and you want it to be a funkier font? Google appears to lower their competitors in Google search results so I figured I would give them a fighting chance.

PrimaryBlogger has the Google Font API plugin enabled by default. You can install the plugin from the “Add New” tab under the plugins section of your WordPress admin. Or, upload the plugin folder to your server and do it the old fashioned way.

Here are 3 font APIs you could use: