Fancy yourself as a games designer? Now is your chance to design, create and market your own computer game with great characters and compelling storylines. Your game only has to meet two criteria for your chance to win some great prizes.
It should be an adventure/platform/puzzle game with a story behind it.
The player should be able to control a character and solve a puzzle or collect items to progress to the next level / complete the game.
If you are a pupil at a school in Scotland then you can enter your game in one of four categories:
Primary Individual
Primary Group
Secondary Individual
Secondary Group
Check out some examples and find out more by watching this video.
You can download the high quality mp4 here, or an iPod mp4 here.
When designing and creating your game, and think about
characters and background that will be used in the game
music and sound effects to be used in the game
levels / progression through the game
Use any game creation tool to build your game. For example 2DIY, Scratch, Kodu, Game Maker, SimsCarnival, Greenfoot, Flash, Net Radiant, Unreal Development Kit, Microsoft XNA or any other appropriate platform
Send us the complete game in an email, or a link or on CD/DVD. Make sure you let us know what software you used.
Need some help to get started?
Consolarium Development Officers, Charlie Love and Brian Clark, are available to offer you some assistance. They can be contacted via email (c.love@ltscotland.org.uk and b.clark@LTScotland.org.uk ).
The Final
Successful finalists will be invited to attend the Scottish Learning Festival on the 22nd/23rd September to present their game to a panel of Game Developers and Industry Specialists. A number of great prizes will also be on offer including a tour of the studio at game developers, Denki.
The closing date for all entries is Friday 3rd September 2010
Calling all Jenson Button and Lewis Hamiltons of the future.
Would you like to race head to head, in front of a live audience and win the title of
SLF10 MarioKarter Champion ?
This year at SLF10 there will be a Mario Kart Grand Prix for Primary and Secondary pupils. In order to qualify you must be in the top 4 verified time trial times.
Teachers must submit a photo of a pupil’s verified Time Trial time. These times will be logged on a leader board held on the Consolarium Glow Group and blog so you can track your position against the whole of Scotland. The four fastest primary pupils and four fastest secondary pupils will be invited, with school representatives, to compete in a live race final at SLF10. In order to submit a qualifying time you must run your time trial according to the criteria below.
The character must be
MARIO
The circuit must be
MARIO CIRCUIT
The Kart must be
STANDARD KART
A picture of the complete time trial showing character, kart and time should be forwarded to b.mclaren@ltscotland.org.uk
The four fastest pupils from each sector will then race head to head in the
50cc Mushroom Cup Grand Prix
in front of a live audience at SLF10.
The driver with the most amount of points at the end of the Grand Prix will be the winner and crowned Mario Kart Champion SLF10 and win a Wii and copy of Mario Kart for their school.
The closing date for verified Time Trial times is September 3rd 2010. Qualifiers will be contacted after this date.
Have you thought about using MarioKart in your class as a contextual hub or topic? Check out the Consolarium Glow Group for ideas on how you might do this. You might also want to think about how you might use MarioKart in subject specific lessons also. Share your thoughts on the Discussion Board at the Wii, Mario Kart section of the Consolarium Glow Group.
We also have a small number of MarioKart kits (console, software and controllers) available on loan until SLF10. If you are interested in receiving one on loan send us a summary of how you would use it and what you feel the impact would be upon your pupils. Our team will get together and examine all bids and decide upon the lucky applicants. Please send bids to b.mcmlaren@ltscotland.org.uk and ensure all bids are with us by Monday March 8th.
Quite a lot of big projects going on at the moment, so a lot to juggle and loads of very interesting, positive findings coming out of the work being undertaken. Our MangaHigh pilot will be coming to end within the next few weeks. We will then have some data to examine and measure the impact of it’s use across a number of secondary schools in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Should be really interesting. Great to see Cleveden, Lochend, Knightswood and Jordanhill in the top ten scorers for this round and well done to Jordanhill, Lourdes and Cleveden who are also in the all time top ten league.
I am heading back up to Highland to visit schools in Castletown, Dornoch and Alvie who along with Dingwall Primary have been undertaking GBL topics using a range of games as part of the Highland Literacy Project. Initial reports are very positive and I am very much looking forward to getting reacquainted with the children and schools over the next week or two. Hear some of the initial thoughts from Dingwall and Alvie below
This week will also see me delivering to a range of Dundee City teachers at a CPD event run by Louise Henderson and the team from Dundee City (check the Glow Group for links to the work they have been undertaking) and then Brian Clark and Myself are heading to Dundee University to show a range of students the kinds of experiences GBL can offer.
As an aside I have also undertaken my Glow mentor training so hopefully the Consolarium Glow Group will continue to improve. Why don’t you check it out and get yourself involved in some of the conversations or start one of your own.
I was invited to a couple of Parent Council meetings this week, asked in to explain the role of Games Based Learning within A Curriculum for Excellence and to showcase some of the projects the Consolarium already has underway and potentially what parents could do to support it in their own child’s school.
Many families will already be familiar with the range of consoles and software available and most of the folks I spoke to at the meetings had more stuff in their houses than I had; yet very few had ever played with them and almost none had played them with their children. (Derek Robertson writes a brilliant blog post “Cod Liver Oil and Effective Learning..”on his personal site at HotMilkyDrink which is well worth a read, from a parent’s perspective)
One of the best things about the job is seeing the sparks of enthusiasm and creativity created by the GBL approach and this was evident again as a room full of parents and carers were excitedly discussing the kinds of things their children could be learning. One of the meetings ended with the Parent Council pretty much demanding (in a good way!) that the school take money from them and get out and buy consoles and implement them in their children’s learning straight away.
A positive partnership between parents and school is really important and ACfE provides a perfect backdrop against which these relationships can be strengthened; and the games based learning approach augments this beautifully.
All of these consoles in homes and all of these learning opportunities. A germ of an idea is beginning to form…………
In the meantime check out the Trailer for Parent Toolkit below
A busy time over the last week or so since my last post. As Ollie mentioned in a previous post I have been toiling away updating our Consolarium Glow Group. In the past this group hasn’t been as successful as we had hoped and it was beginning to get a bit tired looking. I have tried to restructure the way the group works so that you can more easily navigate your way around and find interesting and useful resources. It is still very much a work in progress and you should see it develop over the coming weeks and months particularly with the addition of the Games Design section which will be forming a large part of the work of the Consolarium in 2010. (I am sure that you are going to hear some very interesting things from Brian Clark in the not too distant future about this…)
In order for the Glow Group to be as successful as possible though we really need community involvement. There is so much good practice going on in schools all over Scotland that should be shared and celebrated and Glow will provide an ideal vehicle for this. Join in the discussions, add your own paperwork and weblinks and encourage others to do the same. Let us know what you think about the group, about GBL in general and perhaps some topics you would like to see covered in a Glowmeet.
Other things on the go this week include a visit to Lourdes Secondary to see them using MangaHigh and hearing what staff and pupils think of it and if you follow me on Twitter (@BrianMcL) you will know that I was in Park Primary in Alloa watching some wonderful children drum their African rhythms with an energy and enthusiasm that would have made a Masai warrior proud. I’ll be heading off to Fairview school in Perth and Loch and Calderwood Primaries in South Lanarkshire to discuss the use of GBL as well as a million other things including the next humiliation of the Wii fit weight loss challenge (I am away now to start looking out my lightest clothes to wear for the next weigh in!)
Over the next few months we are going to be expanding the ways that we communicate and publicize the work of the consolarium. We have already made a good start with our bi-weekly podcast where we share what we are up to, ideas, interviews with other practitioners and top tips for classroom practice and professional development opportunities.
We are also working on another few resources that we hope will benefit the whole games based learning community and more information on these services will follow soon.
As part of a bigger project we are working with the on-line service team to audit and up-date the ICT in Education website and the Consolarium pages on sharing good practice. We have a load of other case studies that will be going up online soon and we are just waiting for the interviews to be transcribed.
Finally, we also now have our own dedicated Twitter Channel (www.twitter.com/consolarium). As well as pulling in the RSS feed from this blog we will also be tweeting from the various conferences and events that we attend around the UK.
The whole of the Consolarium team is on Twitter – we find it a great way to keep in contact, to share ideas and resources. You can find us at the following accounts:
Isn’t the Christmas and New Year break just great. However, getting back to work and attempting to fit in to the work clothes can bring one back down to earth with a bump as the two weeks of festive excess appears to still be with you! Fully in-keeping with our Health and Well-Being agenda the team at the Consolarium has resolved to try to shift from their expanded wasit lines the trifle, turkey, mince pies, Black Bun and possibly the occasional beer that they had consumed over the festive break.
The Wii Fit Weight Loss Challenge
We are quite lucky at the Consolarium as we do have access to a variety of exergaming titles. Dance mats have always been popular but we have decided to focus on looking at how the Wii Fit can help us lose weight. The Wii Fit Weight Loss Challenge is now underway! We all weighed ourselves on Wednesday 6th January 2010 and we plan to undertake our exergaming exercise programme over the next 8 weeks with a finish date of Wednesday 3rd March 2010. Here are our initial weights in kilogrammes:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Derek
82.75
79.90
Ollie
94.55
94.10
Brian M
103.00
102.4
Brian C
82.70
83.80
Charlie
85.72
If you would like to participate in the Consolarium’s efforts at getting the weight off then feel free to join us. We are posting our weekly weigh-ins on Twitter with the hashtag of #wiifitweightlosschallenge. Have a go and let’s see if we can make those work-shirts a little less tight fitting!
Stirling Council visits the Consolarium
A recording of us using the Wii Fit board to record our initial weights is part of our second podcast. You can access/subscribe to the podcast via this link. This podcast also contains an interview with our colleagues from Stirling Council, Margaret Cassidy and Joe Shaw. Margaret and Joe have been great partners of the Consolarium and have been involved in quite a few projects with us for example Moshi Monsters, Endless Ocean and Crazy Talk.
AOCBGBL
Our AOCBGBL (any other competent business games based learning) section sees us talking about these resources:
Blue Murder Mystery Files: A narrative driven puzle packed murder mystery game for the PS3. Beautiful graphics, an engaging narrative and real challenge in those puzzles.
Light-bot: Control a robot by giving it commands. Use programmer-style logic for more complex levels that include functions to re-use.
Yudu: A lovely little tool that allows texts to be converted to page turning digital books.
Let us know what you think of the podcast. Your feedback would be appreciated and do feel free to join us in our #wiifitweightlosschallenge!
LTS in conjunction with 4ip worked with SixToStart to create and pilot an iPhone/iTouch App called TapTale. TapTale’s primary goal is to promote literacy through the reading and writing of tales using the tap, tilt, shake and swipe functions of Apples touch screen devices.
When creating a tale, pupils are asked to write chapters using the touchscreen keyboard on the device. In order to progress from chapter to chapter, the reader must use one of the tap, swipe, tilt or shake sequences. It is up to the author of the tale to decide what action must be taken for the reader to see the next chapter.
Once a tale has been created, users can upload them via the device to the taptale website. This allows other registered user to download and read their tales directly on the device. Registered users can provide feedback on any tale via the website using a ‘fridge magnet’ style form. Anyone can read the tales created directly from the site, but of course the tapping and tilting functions are not possible in this view.
This App looks really promising. I really like the idea of pupils incorporating the device’s actions in their tales. For example, each chapter could provide clues to what action is expected for the reader to progress.
Chapter : “… Anum waved goodbye to John …”
Expected Action – Shake Chapter: “… heard a knock at the door …”
Expected Action – Double tap
Encouraging pupils to read and write, provide and receive feedback using interactive and relevant technology should not only improve literacy skills but digital literacy skills.
Needless to say, I am delighted to be involved with the forthcoming pilot and am looking forward to seeing the impact it has.
Now that we have an extended team at the Consolarium we are all looking forward to sharing with you the wide range of teachers and pupils in schools across Scotland who are using game based learning and other emerging technologies in their classroom practice. In episode 1 you will:
Meet the Consolarium team of Derek Robertson, Ollie Bray, Brian McLaren & Brian Clark
Find out what it was about game based learning that informed and influenced their practice and led tem to work at the Consolarium
Meet Ian Simpson from Inverurie Academy in Aberdeenshire who has been using the Sony PS3 game Little Big Planet as a teaching tool in his computing class
Hear of some good websites in our AOCBGBL (Any Other Competent Business Game Based Learning) section
Over the last wee while I have been visiting schools to see the impact of some ongoing projects. I visited Tullos Primary in Aberdeen where a class of primary 6 children have been undertaking a Wild Earth African Safari. I popped in to see a primary 3 class in Dingwall Primary working on a Nintendogs project and then off to Alvie Primary in Kincraig near Aviemore where a composite p 3/4/5 were taking on their own African Safari.
In Tullos Primary the teacher undertaking the project spoke about her experience at an InService day and the rest of the staff were so impressed by the potential that they will be purchasing gaming technology of their own so games based learning can be extended throughout the school.
In Dingwall primary the children have been using their Nintendogs to enhance and improve literacy. Both management and class teacher have been amazed by the impact and how the desire to write and reach an audience outside the school, through their blog, has moved the learning of all the class forward.
From Alvie Primary the teacher has tied the whole experience together as an enterprise Activity and will showcase the work for parents in a Safari afternoon. She also reckons that when the wii is returned to the Consolarium it will have a whole class of children attached to it who will not let it go!
“Play is something that ICT has been bringing into learning from the very beginning. ICT in learning holds the potential to bring back playfulness and engagement…”
The Games based learning approach taps straight into this potential and, for those of us working in the Consolarium, we are lucky enough to see practical examples of the impact of this everywhere we go. Share the joy! If you and your class or school are using games based learning then please let us know and share your good practice.
Blog feed
Over the next few months we are going to be expanding the ways that we communicate and publicize the work of the consolarium. We have already made a good start with 
ir own so games based learning can be extended throughout the school.