Truncation Feud

truncation

Originally uploaded by lmpressl.

Tonight I spent three and a half hours with the other two games. One is a narrowing game, and one is a take on the Family Feud to teach truncation principles.

I spent a fair amount of time in Photoshop, manipulating images to make backgrounds for the games. After that, I tried to get a skeleton for the game, or at least enough to have an idea for how the game could flow.

The truncation game is particularly challenging because I’d like to have multiple “right” answers that have different outcomes based on the text the player enters. Captivate does not seem to have that ability. I tried the “short answer” question slide feature, but that is not particularly well suited for the game (if we’re trying to keep the spirit of Family Feud), and even though I knew the right answers, I could never get the game to say I had entered them correctly. I’m going to sit on this over night and think about what to do a little bit more.

The narrowing game isn’t much better at this point. Originally Susan, Kevin, and I had discussed replicating the “ice breaker” we use in LIB100, letting users “slide” cards around on the board to show the topic from narrow to broad or vice versa. Again, Captivate doesn’t appear to let you have that much control. I think you actually have to use Flash to get that type of functionality. Instead, I’m trying to make due with the “matching” question slide, which again, isn’t exactly right.

So, I’m going to let those percolate over night, and hopefully figure out something by tomorrow after work!

last of boolean slots for the weekend

This weekend I spent an hour making corrections to the Boolean Slots game based on my notes from earlier in the day and I ran a few of the previews to make sure I corrected the major issues I had found.  It’s in pretty good draft 2 format.  I output it as a flash file and will let Susan and Kevin know it’s ready for review.

I’d still like to add reviews to help people realize the important information as well as add a few leading questions (perhaps in these reviews).  I also need to get with Kevin to talk about the scorecards.

previewing boolean slots

I spent an hour and fifteen minutes this morning going through all the different iterations of the Boolean Slots game in “preview” mode.  I found a dependency error and took a lot of notes on minor changes that need to be made to improve the overall quality of the game.  I also figured out (finally!) how to get the “makes sense” button to work early in the game.  It turns out that instead of making the button point to “continue” it has to specifically point to the next slide in the game.  Perhaps “continue” allows the time to continue running on the slide?

I’m set up to get down to business this evening, after our 4^th Thanksgiving.  I have a long list of improvements to make!

big-time boolean slots

Today I was able to do a lot with Boolean Slots!  Specifically:

1. I worked in Photoshop to coordinate the images that we’re using in place of text.  I wanted to make them the same size, remove shadows, and remove the background.  It was a good learning experience.  I spent quite a while trying to get the JPG files to work, only to learn that JPG files apparently don’t allow you to remove white space.  GIF files do.  So, that was useful, as well as learning how to delete backgrounds in Photoshop.  I used these skills to make “smaller” and “larger” versions of the book, deacon, cupola, basketball, football, and lacrosse stick.  This maintains the same look throughout the game.

2. After updating the images, I went in and replaced them where needed, and made sure the updated slides still showed elements appearing at the correct time.  This went much more quickly than yesterday, in large part because I had practice.

3. I looked at each text slide to see where I could reduce the number of words displayed.  This was based on my research on online pedagogy a few days ago.  When I made changes, I copied the slide and pasted it in the places where the same changes needed to be made.  This was certainly faster than making the same change over and over again, but it disrupted the dependencies.  After doing this I had to go through and reset most of the dependencies dealing with “choose a machine.”  To make sure everything is corrected, I’m going to do a “preview” tomorrow.  I can note problems then and correct them easily and quickly.

4. Also based on the online pedagogy research, I went through and added instant messaging information for the Z. Smith Reynolds library reference desk to every page of the game, and I added a slide at the end of the game that has reference contact information via email, IM, and phone, in case players have questions after it’s over.  

5. At this point the draft was starting to look about right, but timing was still off.  So, I went through and adjusted timing, and matched timing across similar slides.  

6.  Everything I’m doing for the Boolean Slots game seems like it’s taking me much longer than it should.  I think this is because the game has grown to over 100 slides.  When one thing has to be updated, it has to be updated across many slides, and it takes a long time to do that type of work.  Keyboard shortcuts help, but it still takes a long time.  I will do whatever I can to keep the next game to be much shorter!

7. I took a few moments to show the draft to my mother in law, a professor at WFU, and she recommended making the sections that have to be read last longer and add in more reviews.  This evening I’ve added more time to the “reading” slides.  Reviews will come tomorrow. 

Things left to do:

• Run preview to make sure changes didn’t disrupt dependencies.
• Add reviews to help people realize the important information.
• Make buttons work.
• Add leading questions.
• Scorecards: get squared version from Kevin and make info easier to digest.