Bow Street Runner represents Channel 4 Education’s first real foray into the world of delivering informal education via alternate-reality games. This one takes the users - it is aimed at the C4 Education heartland of 14-19yr olds - into an immersive environment, using impressive 3-d backgrounds blended with live-action video shot on green screen. It is a broadband experience.

Not only is it a gripping and an exciting game, but its high production values are clear. But you would expect quality video to be shot by a broadcaster of C4’s stature. Still, it is well executed by the C4 production team and Littleloud, the company that made it. You play the part of a Bow Street Runner, a pre-cursor to the modern police force aimed at helping magistrates bring criminals to justice. Played out over five ‘episodes’, you will encounter a range of crimes and will be expected to collect evidence, interview actors, solves puzzles and eventually put your case to the magistrates. Be warned - you aren’t guaranteed a happy ending if your skills aren’t up to the task.

The health warning on the launch page - presumably demanded by the lawyers to avoid the insurmountable online watershed hurdle - will do a nice line in attracting users to click on the launch icon, not a million miles from those teenagers channel flicking in anticipation of the now-infamous C4 red triangle. And much like those teenagers, perhaps they will be drawn into a piece of genuinely engaging work, like those arthouse films in the 80s.

“This game is designed to provide an historically accurate – and therefore grim, violent and salacious – depiction of life”.

My own tiny gripes are that the ’subtitles off’ icon reminds me of the Windows minimise window icon, and that whilst you can mute the sound, you cannot skip the intro. Accessibility-wise you can tab around the navigation but not the in-game elements (presumably a deliberate choice as it’s hide and seek with those). You cannot pause, go back or save. The in-scene scrolling is pretty smooth, and this is a Beta release - the first episode should be ‘hard launched’ on March 6th 2008.

The critics who argue that the game is inaccessible to a schools network audience, or is not mapped to a curriculum, miss the point. The remit of C4 is to offer unmediated, inspiring and possibly controversial content to 14-19yr olds first, and the most progressive of teachers second. Formal education just isn’t their bag - and most likely turns this audience off.

The game itself is not especially innovative - see the BBC’s CDX for example and the idea of delivering informal learning in this way is not new - the BBC also has a strong track record in this field. But, as ever C4 are pushing the boundaries. The content has an edgier feel and is more gritty than you might find over at auntie.

Flash blended video is a fantastic medium for online games & marketing, especially in the realm of delivering informal education. See BBC WebWise or Vodafone Journey for excellent examples of blended interactive flash video.

Where C4 really are innovating is by the wholesale spending of their education budget on interactive content rather than telly. Whilst other broadcasters (OK - the BBC) have large interactive budgets, C4 are the first to take such a big leap, and finally show some real confidence in the medium as a meaningful force for change in their market.

C4 have a defined audience (14-19 years of age) and so they are placing their content where this audience, diverse as it is, can be found. Specifically, this is not watching TV in the mornings during term time (or at least it shouldn’t be). C4 are launching wholeheartedly into the web. Crucially, in another leap of faith, they are also branching out their content onto other platforms such as bebo; MySpace and Facebook. Surely other content providers will follow.

Posted: February 28th, 2008 under Education.
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Assignment #55 Photograph a significant outfit
“This is what I was wearing when I finally truly understood that he was breaking my heart.”
Megs Elyse

I can’t get over Learning To Love You More. No that’s not an oblique reference to my ailing love life, it’s a website that has blown me away. Learning To Love You More is an online collaborative art project conceived by American artists Miranda July and Harrel Fletcher. Set up in 2002 it has so managed to get thousands of people to complete their art assignments and post them on the site, creating an ever growing exhibition of user generated art. Their projects are designed to inspire people to see themselves and others around them as a rich source for provocative art. Assignment #11 asks you to photograph a scar on your body or on someone else’s body and tell the story of how it happened. Two photos of cigarette burns tell very different stories. One is the mark of a girl’s struggle with a boyfriend whose aggressive impulses led him to sear her arm with his fag butt. But another girl sends in a photo of her ex-boyfriend’s scar that was given to him as a rite of passage from his gang of mates. He got it because he successfully made a fool of himself for love by banging on her door for two hours in the dead of night. Assignment #47 asks you to re-enact a scene from a movie that made someone else cry. It tells you to do in less than a minute. Kara Hearn’s rendition of E.T. is amazing. She plays all the parts herself, jacking up the melodrama as she leaps through all the characters at a frenzied pace.

Kara Hearn in E.T.

As you go through the various assignments, from “Make the saddest song” to “Write the phone call you wish you could have” you get the sense that Fletcher and July are asking everyone to reassess their lives. They’re telling us that every little corner of our lives is worth exploring. It’s a symptom of the triumph of web 2.0 where content is no longer decided by a couple of eggheads in a room whose job it is to tell us “This is culture”. Now web content relies on all of us, we are all a vital part of online culture. LTLYM wants to celebrate this by encouraging us all to create art. It’s telling us that we are all artists, not just the lucky few who get canonized by a cultural elite and remembered for their “intensity”. So this is all teaching us to feel empowered, to love ourselves more. Hmm… it’s all beginning to sound a bit like a self help book, don’t worry I’m not gonna go into a nauseating rant about “living in the moment”.

But I do want to encourage everyone who is thinking about how web 2.0 is affecting education to learn from LTLYM’s example. When we made Maths Raps with BEAM Education something quite phenomenal happened. Maths Raps was designed to help children learn unwieldy maths vocabulary and concepts in a fun and catchy way. Children watched videos of rappers performing captivating raps about mathematics. Then children were asked to write up their own raps to perform in class. This caught on and a lot of schools suddenly had a posse of wiley kids stepping up to perform their maths raps. Beam started to receive maths raps transcripts together with audio and visual recordings of this new breed of little maths MCs. It wouldn’t surprise me to find on LTYLYM an assignment that asks “Make a video of a child performing a rap about mathematics.” This leads me to think there should be some kind of online archive for creative educational assignments. The future of learning is pointing towards online learning communities, with many sites like WizIQ already building a large web connecting teachers and pupils in virtual classrooms and networks of learning. It would be brilliant to incorporate into this kind of educational social media an area where teachers can upload the results of online assignments that inspire creativity and a hands on approach to learning. It would be great to have classes all around the country fulfilling assignments. A project for English could be “Act out your favourite Shakespeare scene in the style of an Eastenders episode.” A history assignment might go along the lines of “Get a friend dress up as Oliver Cromwell and make a Channel 4 style documentary about Cromwell’s life.” It would be a great way of getting children to engage with the national curriculum in an imaginative and personal way.

Assignment#30 Take a picture of strangers holding hands.

Posted: February 19th, 2008 under Education, Web 2.0, User generated.
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So the BETT awards for educational technology have been announced and from looking at the winners we can only conclude that standards have been raised. The winning products are bright, original and versatile resources that fulfil the needs of teachers and pupils alike. Upon assessing the winners, I found the most attractive products were those that encouraged creative user experimentation. Critics have always accused educational software of stunting the scope of a child’s imagination. Perhaps in the early days this was a legitimate concern. But the winners of the BETT awards are a testament to how educational technology has moved away from its prescriptive confines. These resources invite a complex response from children, encouraging them to learn abstract concepts through creative play. Check out the winners at www.bettawards.co.uk

Screenshot from Focus on Beebot.

Focus on Beebot by Focus Education Ltd is a surprising product. It consists of a 3D sequencing programme where students can experiment with sequencing tasks to map out a route for Beebot, a bee coloured robot with a permanent smile. Students can guide Beebot through virtual worlds, but they can also programme their sequences into the Beebot floor robot in the actual classroom. This is a wonderful feature as it allows children to apply the abstract principles they have learnt from the software onto a physical piece of machinery. Children can feel satisfied about what they’ve learnt , enjoying the end result of their work by watching Beebot zoom around the classroom.

The sense of a fulfilling learning experience explains the success of 2Simple’s 2paintapicture. This is an art package that allows students to play with a range of artistic techniques. Children can see the results of their efforts attractively displayed on the screen. What gives this product the edge over other art packages is the ability to recreate the styles of well known artists. A child can learn the technical secrets behind great art at the same time as painting their own masterpieces. Noisy things by Q & D Multimedia won the Early Learning Solutions award because of its innovative approach to introducing young children to musical concepts such as rhythm, pitch and tone. Children play around with a variety of colourful, mischievous characters that make different sounds at the click of a mouse. The genius of Noisy Things is its intuitive design. There is no text to disrupt the experience, the children simply learn instinctively through interacting with the characters on screen. This is perfect for early learning because it allows children to learn about music through independent experimentation.

Screenshot from Noisy Things.

Another aspect of the winners was a new emphasis on software that allows for easy assessment and profiling. Bluewaveswift won Supporting Institutional Leadership and Management Solutions award. It was built on a lot of research done by head teachers in Leeds and is designed to provide a comprehensive profile of the state of a school’s development. Testimonials by head teachers all over the country tell of how Bluewaveswift saves hours of work.

Smartcat Profiling by Screen Learning is a selection of thirteen games that assess children’s reading, spelling, mental arithmetic, motor control, language skills and even emotional recognition. This allows teachers of children at the foundation stage to keep an eye on how each child is developing and ensure that they fulfil the needs of each child as an individual. The world of education is currently anxious about low levels of literacy and numeracy skills. Often this is a result of children not keeping up with the rest of the class. Smartcat Profiling has come at the right time, since it ensures that teachers know exactly which children need more help, ensuring everyone learns at the right pace. But what makes it really work is that each exercise is a game that the child can enjoy. This is a refreshing approach to assessment , making it feel less scary and more fun.

Screenshot from SimVenture.

Learning through games is the secret to the popularity of SimVenture. Venture Simulations Ltd have created a programme that allows students to set up a virtual business. Liam Godfrey, lecturer in business studies, has come from a background in banking and has a wide experience of simulation programmes used for professional training. He says that SimVenture is the most comprehensive software of its kind. Students are getting hooked on the game. The more competitive they get about scores the more clued up they are about the real dynamics of the business world. This is the beauty of these winning programmes: they draw children into a genuine passion for a subject. Technology isn’t there to make boring subjects interesting but to make fascinating subjects accessible. When you get sucked into a subject you love, learning is always fun. These products are taking full advantage of this phenomenon, taking us out of the Victorian austerity of the three r’s and into a future of varied and enjoyable learning.

Posted: February 19th, 2008 under Education, Design, Publishing, Web 2.0, BETT.
Comments: 1