You might wonder what the heck this title has to do with our latest game updates. I’ll tell you. Grain farmers plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. In the summer, they are worrying about weeding and pest control. So, what do they do in the winter? Go to Florida? We will pause while these farmers laugh at you.
The farmers I know spend a lot of time in the winter getting ready for the rest of the year. They do maintenance on their machinery because it’s pretty darn inconvenient if your thresher breaks during harvest or your tractor quits working during planting season. They have multiple machines with a lot of parts that can wear out or break.
An updated Forgotten Trail is now available. There are a lot of minor changes that add up. We have a sign out button, even though you don’t need to sign out and when you closed the browser window your game will be automatically saved. So, why did we add that and why now?
Any time students are asking the teacher how to play a game, it’s a problem
Teachers don’t have enough class time to cover everything they need to address as it is. The last thing they need is students raising their hands and asking how to log out of a game. So, if you close the browser, it still saves your game. If you are looking for a sign out button to save your game, you can use that one.
Another change we made on several of our games is moving the next arrow or changing the size of the game screen so that the next arrow shows without students having to scroll down. Forgotten Trail was created nine years ago when we had a successful Kickstarter campaign. A lot has changed in computers used in schools and screen sizes in nine years. It may seem obvious to you, an adult, to scroll down to see the next arrow, but unless it is obvious to 100% of the students, someone will be raising a hand and asking a question. Any time our game distracts the teacher’s attention, we consider that a failure.
Of course, summer is the ideal time for us to make these changes. There are a few schools using the games in summer school, but nothing like during the school year. We are also testing extensively before we put the updated game on the site. If we make a mistake and leave out a needed file, the inconvenience would be only to a few users in summer school as opposed to thousands during the school year.
You can play now and see the changes .
When you play the game, it will look much the same. What gives? When teachers have made powerpoint or slide presentations with a screenshot or included it in a lesson to teach a specific standard, they don’t want to go back and have to re-do it. We kept the same story about the Ojibwe migration, the same questions on fractions and statistics.
We made a LOT more changes, too, adding more instructional content for students if they get a problem incorrect, but that’s for another post.
Just so you know, we are also making new games in the summer. If you are an educator – teacher, librarian, culture teacher – and interested in making games with us, check out the chance to create a game about Native American veterans, using resources from the Library of Congress.