KidsTeam Project

Due Saturday, December 18: No extensions without an Incomplete petition.

I. Concept

Working in pairs or small teams, develop a prototype for a Flash game suitable for middle-school students (ages 10-14). The games are intended to be presented in or with the International Children's Digital Library ( www.icdlbooks.org), a project that presents children's literature via the World Wide Web. Games must be derived from Alice in Wonderland, ideally using themes or events in one of the first three chapters. The game must satisfy two objectives: generally, interesting students in the book and its imagined world; and more particularly, revealing or emphasizing some aspect of the story and/or its expression.

II. Scope

By November 13 you should be ready to present a prototype to KidsTeam: at least one playable level of the game, ideally producing at least 3 minutes of sustained engagement.

By December 18 you must produce a complete mini-game, with feedback, scoring, winning/losing outcomes, and at least three phases or levels of play.

III. Suggestions

Work out your ideas with the design partners during your first meeting. Try to strike a balance between action/animation and verbal engagement, or between generic styles of game play and the particular features of Alice.

Arcade or platform-style games (e.g., Mario Brothers) should be easy to implement based on the scene-scroller lab we covered in September. Word games represent another interesting possibility. Please do NOT consider a multiple-choice quiz.

You may model your design on professional examples. HOWEVER, you must fully acknowledge debts for any borrowed code, and more important, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HOW THAT CODE WORKS -- or fails to work. It can be very dangerous to import "black box" code whose operations you do not understand.

IV. Technical considerations

Please do not use copyrighted sound or visuals (especially anything from Disney). You may use the John Tenniel engravings from the original edition, since they are out of copyright.

I will give detailed instructions for formatting and turning in your final work as we get closer to the final deadline. You may store working files on the student-iat server, but please keep multiple backups.