In my ongoing exploration of the Adobe Education Exchange, and coverage of the Adobe Educator’s Awards, I stumbled across this really simple, and effective tool for younger students that need practice with or introduction to the concept of a coordinate grid.
Kristine Kopelke, an Australian educator who works with technology, communications, and interactive tools with a wide variety of teachers, created and shared this great flash game that lets students explore the coordinate X,Y system with a cute theme. The idea is to help Captain Slackbeard find his lost treasure by using the coordinates on the map. It’s very simplistic in that students only have right answers to click on, and don’t suffer any consequences for wrong choices, but in a way that’s a very nice, and refreshing way for students to practice plotting points on a coordinate grid in a “skill and drill” fashion. Check out my video below as I explore the game!
For a direct link to the Flash game (where you can even download it), follow this link for the Flash legend of Captain Slackbeard. You will have to sign up for an Adobe account to access it.
For those of you wondering, yes I was asked to explore the Adobe Education Exchange, so in the interest of full disclosure I’m helping them out, but I didn’t just want to write about the tools, I wanted to show them off, so I hope you enjoy! If you want to enter your own creation into the Adobe Educator Awards, hurry up, you only have a couple of week left!
RSS - Posts
Hi Ben. Thanks for featuring the Legend of Captain Slackbeard on your blog. I invented him many years ago now and students always loved the idea of a pirate who was too lazy to make his own maps. I have taken on the feedback from your video and will do an update of the game that features your suggestions. You could assist by doing the sound files – you have a great pirate voice 😉
I think the idea of lazy pirates would play to many audiences, not just students and teachers 🙂
As for you offer, I’d be more than happy to help with making a tool like this a little more immersive and engaging. I’m curious about the development cycle behind a tool like this, and who you consult with as you create it. What does the timeframe look like, and who do you consult with? I did a lot of work in the area of games and simulations for my master’s, and I’m curious 🙂
Hii again. This was my first real learning object that I created in Flash. I had actually originally created a kit of Slackbeard activities in PowerPoint that were similar in nature but didn’t have the same level of interactivity. I just had to convert Slackbeard to a Flash learning object once I started playing in Flash. I was really just learning at the time so didn’t work through a formal development cycle. I basically just brainstormed ideas on paper, created the graphics and then added the script to create the interactivity. The actionscript is very simplistic as I was really a beginner at the time. This learning object took about 20 hours to make though I had the Slackbeard concept, story and activity concept worked out before I started in Flash.
If you are interested in seeing something I created that did follow a development cycle and involve consultation, I have submitted my Mai’s Place and Albert’s Backyard interactive learning environments (objects) to the Adobe Education Exchange too. These took over 400 hours to make and for the second environment Albert’s Backyard, I did complete full product proposals, storyboards, consultation and testing. The testing was done as part of research for my Masters and the research showed that students acquired vocabulary faster using the interactive environments than with traditional teaching methods.
I have a video about them and their creation as well as the full environments for free download at:
http://edexchange.adobe.com/posts/0f42440db4
Btw, I’ll definately take you up on that Captain Slackbeard Version 2 offer at some stage.