Last Day

My last day of work has come and gone so quickly! The summer is flying and I'm really sad that this is my last day at the WWWF. Because I've been traveling I'm quite behind on the game making process and today I got to see what they are working on and the game page looks amazing. So does the game! Today I worked on tying up the loose ends. I had an intercoder from a while ago to check and send off to Rebecca. Mostly though, I spent the day looking at the Wiki for the training camp in WV that Idit and Itay were just at. From July 15th to the 17th, they gathered educators and gave them an abridged run through of the curriculum and had them organize in teams and create basic games. I looked at the Wiki over all and the pages for each team to check their progress and see which parts of the schedule the best grasped and which they failed to use or comprehend. I wrote up a report on what I found through the pages. It will be interesting to see the progress that next year's Globaloria teachers make on their games before the next conference in August. It was surprising to see the disparity in what the teams were able to come up with in 3 days. Some had almost everything the curriculum called for and almost a full game while others hardly had any of the components the curriculum called for and were very disorganized. I've really enjoyed working here!!!

Today I came back from Aruba a tiny bit behind on the H-Life project. But I quickly caught up and learned Flash from Rebecca and Leslie. We finalized a game idea. We are going to present clues at the beginning of each level that correspond to a food. Within that level (i.e supermarket, playground, bedroom, bathroom, gym, etc.) the player would be charged with avoided "bad food" obstacles to find the correct food that corresponds to the clue (there will be 3 healthy choices). Today I made the background screens for the bedroom, bathroom, living room, playground and supermarket and worked on adding moving objects as obstacles.

Eighth Day

Today was another busy day- they all seem to be. We spent the whole day working on Idit's presentation and it seems that it is finally done! I think it came out really nicely. I've also been sporadically checking our MySpace and we have 9 friends already and a few posts. Toby messaged me with the MySpace names of 3 of his friends so I added them as well. Tomorrow I leave for Aruba and hopefully Idit or Shannon will have an exciting project for me to work on while I'm away!

Seventh Day

Today was another exciting day at the WWWF. Leslie, Rebecca, Jadry and I spent the whole day working on Idit's powerpoint presentation for the NECC conference. We have already laid out all the slides and created images for each slide and now are in the process of actually creating them. We are almost done and certainly will finish the presentation tomorrow.

Fifth Day

I didn't get to write yesterday because I was very busy. In the morning Jadry and I created an organization page for WWWF on TakingItGlobal and then created a Globaloria page on MySpace. We already have 7 friends from the MCTC and RTC classes. We plan to use the page to draw some publicity to the program and to allow the students to share their work amongst each other. (an upgrade from the wiki, Steward commented). In the afternoon, we learned to code games with Rebecca, the head of research. We looked at the group Experimental Ninjas' game, Zeitgeist, spent a while playing it (and yet could not beat it!) and the coded the game based on a series of categories such as design, functionality, presentation, etc. We met as a group to discuss disparities in our results and to clarify the reasons for them. We made a few changes to the questions asked in the coding and now are going to code a few other games today. Overall, it was a fun and busy first day back from Bermuda!

Third Day

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at the XO computer and the activities on it and starting to write up small reviews of each activity. I've made small suggestions of what I think would be hard to use and what is confusing and what could be improved. I plan to do this for all of the activities and then to download the MMM games and to compare the two types. I've also updated my profile website.

Third Day

Today is my third day at work at the Worldwide Workshop Foundation and it was a big day! We had a furniture delivery to the new office and phone installation! It's really coming together. So far, today I've worked on writing my journalistic piece on what I found on the Randolph Technical Center's class and the Five Experimental Ninjas. My article has an introduction and three sections: Course Outline, Students' Wiki Pages, and Group Games. I wrote what I had seen on each of the pages and given my suggestions based on what I had reviewed. I sent the article to Shannon and am waiting for feedback. Meanwhile, I updated my work progress page and am blogging about my experience. Jadry is currently working on/ finishing her piece on the MCTC class (where the Experimental Ninjas went) and we have spent some time discussing the overlap. That's basically it for today's work so far.

Second Day

Today was my second day of work at the World Wide Workshop Foundation. Today, I looked at the wiki for the Randolph Technical Center's class. I reviewed their website, their work, their user profiles, their games, etc. Five boys from that class, self proclaimed experimental ninjas, continued their education by taking a class online at MCTC. I also looked at their work and compared the difference between their progress at the collegiate and high school level. I typed up about 5 pages of notes on my findings among all the different pages. These pages of notes described the 2007-2008 page created by teacher Mrs. Stalnaker, each game, the user profiles of everyone in the class, the pages organization, the game proposals by the five experimental ninjas and a table of the groups and the games they made. I made some comments on the organization of some of the pages and the cluttering caused by unnecessary information. I noted that the students used the pages for personal expression, jokes, notes, etc. which was nice, but some of the personal stuff made the pages confusing. It was nice to see the students getting comfortable with using the web to communicate with their classmates. I also noted how the teacher was able to post her comments right on the students' work- a nice thing for a teacher to be able to do in any class. Jadry worked on looking at the webpages for the MCTC class, our work overlapped with the Five Ninjas. Tomorrow, we plan to write up what we took notes on today in a journalistic description of the programs. We spent the full day on the 6th floor in the new but empty office!

My Profile

http://www.myglife.org/twiki/index.php/User:Ewolf

First Day of Work

Today we started working for the WWWF. Shannon and Idit gave us an introduction to their many platforms and showed us how to use a wiki. I created my own profile and account on their Twiki and now have started my own blog. I got to play around a bit with the websites (myglife, myslife, etc), to check out some of the games (I caught an error in the Exploring Countries game) and to play with the XO laptop for the first time.