END OF THE YEAR PARTY!! YAY!!
Today we brought our parents and the whole team had a little show-and-tell. We showed video, posters and Flash animations of all the hard work we've done all year long. And of course, a KidsTeam party wouldn't be complete without pizza, cokes and cake!! And the best part--our kids got their big gifts for working so hard this year. We look forward to even more fun and good work next year....see you then!!
This was our last official KidsTeam meeting before our big party, so we used this time to work on our poster and presentation for our parents and also to think about everything we've done over the last year. We even made a little documentary to show how we do things like sticky notes, bags of stuff, brainstorming and Flash. We're ready to party....
This week, we covered annotations again with Yoram to get a few more ideas, then we moved on to Stuart's "Falling Objects" game. We all created cool characters, backgrounds and objects in Flash for Stuart to put into the game. Then, those of us that didn't get a chance to read "Alice in Wonderland" in e-Books, the ICDL and on paper last time got a chance to use all three tools and reflect about what they thought each tool did well, what each tool didn't do well, and three ideas for enhancing the tools.
Yoram came back this week with an actual annotation prototype the he and Rahul designed based on our feedback from the last few weeks. This time, our kids could highlight and attach icons and sticky notes to the page of text that they were reading. Everyone thought it was so awesome, but of course Alex uncovered some funny zooming bugs that Yoram now gets to fix. ;)
This week, Yoram brought in some of his ideas for the annotation system he is creating for us to use with the digital library--he wants kids to be able to write notes and add icons to things that they are reading. He was having some trouble figuring out what the icons might look like for words like "confusing," "sad," "question," "interesting," and "look." To get feedback and design ideas, he posted those words as labels on the board with a bunch of sticky notes under each one. Everyone on the team had to draw an icon that made them think of that word--Yoram got a lot of really interesting suggestions, and he and Rahul are planning to work on these ideas and make the annotation system really cool and the icons easy to understand.
Sante, our team member from College Park, visited to work with us on developing a game about hazards. We have worked on "HazardRooms" before when we did research on specific environmental hazards, so we used our notes from that research to develop an idea for a game. The girls team worked on carbon monoxide by developing a three level first person game that teaches how to go through an average day and effectively avoid this hazard. The boys developed a fishing game about mercury. We sketched our ideas so Sante could take them back and start to work on them at the College Park lab!
