If you’ve played the beta version of Making Camp Navajo, and even if you haven’t, then we have great news. Making Camp Navajo went through a lot of huge changes and is now out of beta. Say hello to Making Camp Navajo 1.0! 
One of the major changes that Making Camp Navajo went through is having the game updated so that it uses our 7 Gen Blocks. When we first developed Making Camp Navajo, we hadn’t created our educational game platform, 7 Gen Blocks, yet. As Aahanaa, one of our developer interns, states, “We took the old code and put it into our 7 Gen Blocks to give the game a consistent style and ensure it fits perfectly on Chromebooks.” When developing educational games, we always pay attention to the devices that our audience is using in order to optimize our games for the most used devices – Chromebooks are one of those devices. In addition to using 7 Gen Blocks, code that loaded slowly was removed in order to have the game work faster for everyone regardless of their hardware or internet. There were also other improvements made to Making Camp Navajo that came from user feedback. Like we’ve said in the past, we love to get user feedback as a way to continuously improve our games. So thank you to our users for your input!
Varied assessments was another improvement made to Making Camp Navajo. Meaning, how we generate math problems for game modules was improved. Instead of having a prewritten value in a question, we gave it a range of possible values to choose from so that it randomly generates the numbers for the question. So every time you play, there’s a unique question with a different answer allowing students the chance to practice more.
Other specific improvements that were made to Making Camp Navajo and worth noting because they make students’, and therefore teachers’, lives easier, are adding hints and extra instructions everywhere so that when students (predictably) skip the instructions and go straight to the game or simply don’t pay enough attention, there’s still something that they can refer to and also making sure that answers entered are accepted regardless of how they’re inputted. For example, when answering ratio questions, we can now accept answers with spaces in them in addition to the previous answer possibilities like ‘1 : 5’, ‘1:5’, ‘2:10’, etc. There’s more room to learn if there aren’t small issues like this propping up!
Finally, art assets for mini-games were updated to make the overall game look better which, as we’ve learned throughout the years, contributes to student engagement. So check out some before and after shots from the game and play the new Making Camp Navajo today!
BEFORE AFTER
