Cutting and Sticking…

Today was possibly one of the best practical sessions ever! Was all about getting us to think about layouts and things to include in our games. Katina had a whole stationary cupboard with her! Although the cutting and sticking made a pleasant change from all the programming and what have you we’re doing at the moment, it was also really useful in getting us to think about colours which could be used and how we want to lay the screen out.

Here’s what we came up with:

To explain it:

• We’ve gone with very bright colours, we think predominantly primary colours as they are very bright and will hopefully grab the attention of children, who often have very short attention spans.
• The red rectangle would be where the questions are written, in a nice big clear font.
• There’s a colour palette, which we’re debating over whether to include. It would be used as part of the questions, ie ‘draw a blue square’ and the child would need to select the colour blue then draw the shape.
• The screen is divided into , one area for each part of the process, to show them as separate component parts of a whole process, although this wont be apparent to the children. This could just be seen as levels to them, they need to complete one part to move on to the next.
• Rounded corners give the screen a more approachable quality, this is important we feel, in gaining the children’s confidence. If they think the game is fun they’ll get more out of it.
• The video symbols. It was pointed out to us that the children might not know what the symbols mean. We’re going to investigate this, and ask either the children themselves or their teaching staff, possibly both to make sure we’re not adding a component to the game which they wont understand, and therefor use.

We arranged to go into Boringdon on Monday to observe an IT lesson with each reception class, so this will give us a chance to see what sort of level the children’s skills are currently at and give us a better idea of how challenging to make the game. As well as this we hope to see if the children are familiar with the video symbols.