After an exhausting week, a day trip up to Kilifi (one hour north of Mombasa) helped a bit, but it created a new problem: I have the worst sunburn I have ever had in my life. No, I wasn’t wearing sunscreen, and as a result I know your pity ends there, but it is a bit odd because normally I only apply sunscreen to my nose and shoulders with no trouble, but in this case, my feet are burnt! So are my hands, and, well, everything, although my face is okay because it was shaded by the book I was reading.
I took this picture before I realized I was being slow-roasted:
So today I’m not teaching because my knees hurt so much from the sunburn and it pains me to wear long pants. So, while my students go neglected thanks to me, I thought I might as well update the old blog.
While I was in Kilifi I visited a volunteer who bought me a delicious mango and who also let me into her Deaf School’s computer lab, which has a dozen or so Pentium 4 machines, all donated by CFSK, putting my school’s library to shame. I brought my laptop along and with a little help I was able to load up the computers with an array of educational software, and the one machine that wasn’t booting at all worked just fine with my custom DOS Educational Disk, which is pretty cool, as I designed it, after all, to be a “quick fix” for times like these.
From the sustainability perspective, the experience was less than ideal, just because running all the separate installation programs would have taken too much time for a non-IT person, but nonetheless the students can now do more than just “learn computers.” They can use computers to learn all sorts of subjects. I wrote to the NGO that donated the computers to ask if I could help arrange a better suite of pre-loaded software for future donations.
Here are some kids who wanted a glimpse of what the grown-ups were doing in the lab:
Since I’m sidelined at the moment, I’ve been watching movies (I bought a war movie compilation a while back, so I don’t fall out of touch with violence while I’m in the Peace Corps) and I’ve been doing more research on educational software. For those of you with the interest and the time, I have really been enjoying one particular site. Here are a few pages from it that I found particularly relevant to what I’ve been researching:
- A history of educational game reviews and critical thinking about elearning
- The site’s editor’s PhD dissertation (which confirms my own observations)
- How his site reviews educational games
- (Lots of reviews here)
This is the only site I’ve found so far that actually reviews educational software in a meaningful way. It was a great find, because some 500+ educational softwares are released every year, so how the heck am I supposed to know which ones to look at?
In any case, I’ve started drafting a short design document for what I think will be best for teaching the kids here with computers. It’s a ways off from completion, but it’s nice to be entering that stage.
In totally unrelated news, I recently noted in my far-less-prolific movie blog that The Mustachioed Bandit Meets His End now has an IMDB page. I’ve submitted more info to them that’s not yet public, but even in its incomplete state, the page isn’t half bad. Unfortunately my name is in IMDB in two different places, so I’m waiting for them to merge the entries so my giant moviemaking ego can be consolidated into one easy-to-read page.
The way this game works is close to identical to the CD-ROM version of its Monkey Island 1. I note only two meaningful differences: maps have compasses, and there is an “easy” mode,” which might be good if the kids have a hard time with the more difficult puzzles.
Indy 2 is basically the same as Monkey 1 CD-ROM and Monkey 2. Verbs have been rearranged slightly and the fonts and colors have changed, but that’s about it. The map has a compass but no letters to indicate direction.
Let’s start with the negative: the font is difficult to read. Especially for early readers, who are used to seeing “proper” text, this may be too much.
On the positive side, the subtitled cutscenes have a lot of fun with text size and placement, which is more engaging… if only this font was more clear at smaller sizes!
Interface changes are otherwise subtle: six inventory items instead of eight, although this stopped mattering when they converted to icons, and (I kind of like this) to “use” or “give” an item you need to drag the icon with the mouse, as you can see here as I use my inventory item “hamster” with the microwave. If only the text was more prominent along with the icon, this would be more significant.
The beginning of the end. “Sam & Max” removes the text element from LucasArts adventure games. There is no longer a verb list: verbs are now represented as icons (the fist as an example for “use” or “do”).
Inventory is made up as icons, as before, but this time with no text representation. You can optionally look at the items using the eyeball icon, but that elicits a more verbose description, not a simple vocab word.
Even the conversation trees have been simplified, narrowed down to icons for “question,” “exclamation,” “non-sequitur.”
To start, they grey out when not relevant, which lowers the regular verb count to 12, which is kind of a bummer, but it’s worth it. When lit up, selecting “Talk” actually begins building the phrase, “Talk to,” which is a subtle but nice lesson in word context. 
“Talking” is sometimes just canned conversation, which we’ve seen in the older games, but new for this game is that you must occasionally decide what you are going to say based on a list of options. This is has much more potential as an active reading activity than simply watching cutscenes, and it reinforces proper English instead of simple command-grammar.
“Travel” in Indy is more like “New kid” in Maniac Mansion than anything else. It’s not used like the other verbs; rather; the next screen offers some choices that complete the phrase, and then you get a change in location. This phrase-building is better for sentence construction skills than “New kid,” which simply presented a list of names.
Not to mention that a little geography never hurt anyone. Actually, in addition to maps as a cool part of the cutscenes, Indy actually adds even more game controls on top of the “action” mode and the new “talk” mode. I haven’t gotten very far into the game, but 
Wow, this games is a complete departure from the momentum behind Indy. There are no verbs whatsoever, and no inventory list. When clicking an item, a version appears as an icon with text (“leaf” example at right), but that’s it. Text also appears during conversations and similar events, but there are no conversation trees, as there were in Indy.
I like the icon with text, which makes is more clear what has been clicked on. In previous games, if something was not visually clear, it could be clarified only through text. “What is that little black thing under the door mat? Oh, a key” (Example from Maniac Mansion). This could be done better for the early readers who may not know the word key, so the clarification is lost on them. An extra close-up visual is very good. The other positive about this game is that it teaches rudimentary C-cleft music reading, although that is of dubious value to the Deaf.
Improvements are present; however, and one of them is significant from my perspective. In previous games, items needed to be clicked in order to see their text equivalents, but in this game, hovering the mouse accomplishes the same thing. This make the game more playable, but more interestingly, it means that a player will experience more text repetition just by moving the mouse around.
A few minor changes that also involve text: a right-click behavior is now highlighted in yellow by default when hovering the mouse. In the pictures above, you can see that it is “Talk to” for the storekeeper and “Look at” for the chickens. This will help guide early readers in getting around, although solving puzzles still requires using the gamut of verbs. Subtitles are also now more involving, with the text appearing near the speaker’s head instead of in the top letterboxed area. It is sometimes used stylistically, as with the three laughing pirates above. This is a small improvement, I think, in the level of engagement with younger readers.
This game is also significant in that when it was released for CD-ROM, the interface was revamped with icons for the inventory items, similar to Loom. The differences is that in Loom, every item you interact with has in icon. In Monkey Island, only your inventory items do. Of course, Loom had no inventory, so it’s apples-and-oranges, but Monkey Island is still a step behind in that regard. Also, text equivalents of items only appear when you hover the mouse over the item (like “Look at sword,” above), whereas Loom always showed the picture and the text. 
Monkey Island CD-ROM also drops the “Turn On” and “Turn Off” verbs, which is too bad, and the “Walk to” verb gets a special default status, so it doesn’t appear with the other nine; rather, it appears when you click anywhere on the screen that doesn’t trigger another verb, which is think is better for gameplay and doesn’t really hurt learning, as it still appears on screen a lot.