Lots of changes are happening in Fish Lake. I’ve posted a few of these over the past couple of months and now you can see some of them for yourself.
There are 15 new videos.
Originally, many of the educational videos were me talking over powerpoint slides with a bit of sound and animation effects. We have replaced these with animated videos. Eventually, we’ll have almost all of the videos redone.
We have updated artwork and design on dozens of pages.
New page when failing the quiz
Old page when failing the first quiz
We’ve added more hints to pages, more educational resources, more voice overs and more “read it to me” options on pages.
We found that many of the younger players enjoyed the games but were slowed down by the need to read the text. We thought giving them the option to have the text read to them would make the game more enjoyable and them more likely to continue playing. For children who don’t know how words are pronounced, either because English is their second language, they have a reading disability or just because they have not had a lot of books read to them, this offers an additional educational benefit.
At the same time, for older players, the game can be played without having the text read.
If you haven’t guessed, I’m a big fan of universal design principles, where something is equally accessible to people with and without disabilities.
There are also the behind the scenes portions ... the changes we made to the free Fish Lake demo decreased the download speed by nearly a third. If you live in an area where you don’t have 50 MPS download speed, that’s an issue.
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If you don’t own Fish Lake, get it here for $9.99
New page that leads to learning activities