We’ve started working with Heriot-Watt University on the Adventure Author Project.

13 or so individually installed patches, extra RAM, suite refresh, crashed servers and a graphics card driver update later and we were ready to begin.  Was it worth the wait?  I can definitely answer in the positive.  I’d drip fed the class that we were going to start an exciting new project, but I hadn’t wanted to get their hopes up until we could actually begin.  ICT Support had been excellent, but it was still a bit of a nightmare to get to a starting position.

Because of this delay, starting towards the end of October, and the ensuing craziness that is a primary school at Christmas time, it has been somewhat of sporadic journey.  Hopefully, with shows now behind us, we have a slightly clearer run in until the end of term, which will allow us to get our virtual teeth stuck into Adventure Author.

The initial feedback from the class has been so positive.  This involved pupils sending emails from home saying how much fun they had had in class that day.  Also, some of the boys chose to go to homework club to use the computers rather than go out to play football at lunch time.

Initially, we gave the pupils space to play and explore in pairs… a class of 30 fits nicely into an ICT suite that way!  Worlds were created, as were Zombie armies.  Dragons were discovered, as were a number of functions that we planned to introduce later on!  Fancy that, finding stuff out for themselves, rather than waiting to be told in an order that suits the teacher… shame on them!  In a way, the next stage was quite a difficult step, to try to bring some order, some structure, some objective to the project, and share this with the class.  Do you want to create a fantastic computer game, or would you rather come here and discuss plots?  Well, actually we’re going to do both!  And, actually they did!