Often, people have told us that we should integrate the educational content more tightly with the games. However, that’s prohibitively expensive. The idea that we would have all of our educational content for example spoken by 3D characters in the games, or act it out by, say, catching 125 fish, sounds great except for the fact that creating 3D content takes a lot of time and money.
Having finally gotten some time to work on revising Fish Lake, we are doing exactly that but in a different way. We’re making a tighter connection between the 3D game content and the educational content by incorporating, as much as possible, the artistic element in the game with the educational elements. Let me show you the example below:
Old page that leads to learning activities
This page was replaced with this one.
New page that leads to learning activities
The problem on finding 7/8 was changed from this one
Old snares problem
to this one
New snares problem
Not only is the 2nd problem visually better, but it adds a little playful element by having the grandfather from the game sort of hidden at the end where 8 eighths is, as a visual of which end is the beginning and which is the end of the trail.
One last example, the page where you choose where to go learn more – I still need to add an activity here when I get time. I already know what I want to include, just need a few hours to code it.
Old ‘learn more’ page
New ‘learn more’ page
There are 3 of us – me, Marisol and Devon – who will be working on making hundreds of changes like this in both the pages and videos of educational content. Why didn’t we do this before? Are we just stupid?
The answer is,
No, we are not stupid.
It’s just a matter of time and money. The more games we sell, the more investment we get, the more we can implement the changes that we know we need to make.
All of you who have provided suggestions and criticisms, we thank you and hope you know that we were never ignoring you.
We’ll have the revised Fish Lake available before Christmas (or spring semester for you teacher types). Well before that – in a few weeks – we’ll have our first app, Making Camp, available to the public. I’m sure, many people will have some criticisms of that too. I’m looking forward to those because it will just make the final app better.
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