Educational Games and Games for Fun

This week was a lot of fun in Edtech 564. We were assigned to play games. Being assigned to play a game is about the only time I can enjoy playing. Usually I am too concerned with my daily, weekly, and monthly to-do list that I don't enjoy pushing all of that to the back of my mind while I play. Luckily I enjoy much of what I do, so I don't ever miss playing games. Naturally, when I am tasked with playing a game, I enjoy that time as well.

I played four games this week, two educational and two strictly for entertainment. I have to say I enjoyed the educational games better than the entertainment games. For education, I played DuoLingo and Never Alone. For entertainment, I played Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly and Knights of the Old Republic.

Duo Lingo keeps harassing me, encouraging me to keep playing. So I haven't really stopped playing it. I plan to keep going with never alone. But I think I am done with Enter the Dragonfly (It isn't my favorite Spyro and I don't like playing as the other characters). Knights of the Old Republic, even though I legitimately spent $10 to purchase the app, I am pretty sure I am done. Maybe one of my kids will play it for me to get my $10 worth. Maybe I will try again if I find myself on a long layover without any homework.

Right now I think homework is a mix between gaming and social media for me. I find I check my Moodle more often than I check my Facebook. But I am almost done with school and maybe then I will need games to keep me distracted.

Pokemon Go Love Letters

In EdTech 564 this week we were assigned to download, play, and review Pokemon Go. Luckily for me I had been playing since its release in July of 2016. This should have been an easy task for me as it is now going on 2 years since I have played it. This task, as it turned out, was not easy for me. I have a bunch of bias from my love/hate relationship with Pokemon go. I don't play as much as I used to. Somethings have changed, like the rules for gyms. And I have a bunch of anecdotal stories that feed my bias. Since I didn't have room for these stories in my review, I thought I would share them here.

Back in the day, when my Pokemon could take a gym, I was attending a training in SLC. I would walk around downtown during the lunch break and play Pokemon go. I was king of the Salt Lake City temple for a few minutes. This is a picture of me and my Starmie on top of the gym (ignore the leonardo - I couldn't find my original pictures so had the settle for the pic stitch i posted to instagram). Starmie wasn't my highest CP pokemon, it's just one I thought would look good on top of the temple.

A few months later I was in London and thought I would replicate this feat. I wanted to get my Tauros on top of the gym at Buckingham Palace. FYI Tauros is a pokemon that is only available in the United States. So I wanted Tauros to win for kin and country. The action at Buckingham Palace was so fast and furious, I didn't have a chance. It seemed like all of the 50 people sitting around the fountain anchor were fighting for that top spot.

Once I was at a training held a block away from a casino in Reno, NV. Every night I played Pokemon. My training finished early on a Friday afternoon. I was so elated that I had passed the certification and had the rest of the day off. I ran to my room, dropped off  my gear and headed down the elevator to catch some more Pokemon. Deep in the game, I started to get off on the wrong floor. A gentleman in the elevator stopped me from making that mistake. I joked with him and told him that the hotel was crawling with Pokemon and that the game had distracted as I was trying to catch them all. He then asked me if I wanted to party later. "What did I just say? This place is crawling with Pokemon and they aren't going to catch themselves!" I declined. I learned to be more aware that day.

This summer, a professor that I work with had a couple of friends come visit him from the east coast. He hadn't seen them in years. He had planned out an itinerary of interesting sites for them to see while visiting Utah, including Zions National Park, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and Monument Valley, to name a few. My friend the professor had rearranged his schedule to make sure he could have a week free to explore Utah with his friends. In the end, all they wanted to do was play Pokemon. He texted me one saturday to let me know he was stuck at the park beside the library as it was a Pokemon community day and his friends refused to go anywhere that wouldn't have service or pokestops. (My friend is a Pokemon Go hater - as he liked it better when it was called Ingress)

I fired up Pokemon Go to work on my assignment for 564 while I was at a training in Maryland. As I was walking to the nearest Pokestop, I came across a Squirtle. Squirtles were hard to catch back in the day. I relived a great memory of the first Squirtle my kids and I caught. We were walking around a park after dark (the very park my friend the police officer threatened to have Pokemon Go shut down because it was over run with gamers). We knew that there was a Squirtle around but we couldn't find him. So we split up and started canvasing the neighborhood. I found him in someones yard and called to my kids to join me. No sooner than we were back on the side walk. Around four cars suddenly parked, the occupants jumped out and ran to the spot where we had caught the Squirtle. Those players got him too. :) 

Playing Pokemon Go at night is as fun as when I used to play kick the can as a kid! It might be time for another night raid.

Tooling around with HP Reveal

This week we looked at HP Reveal in EdTech 564. This app seemed to work best when the trigger image simply triggered one event, like show a short video. I was excited to try and design a educational activity. I started out with something that I thought would be easy show some images and then link to a YouTube video. When I showed my son, he was not impressed with the linkage to the YouTube video of Lawrence O'donnell explaining Standing Rock. He showed me that Supaman had sampled the O'donnell clip an put it to music. If I played the music from Supaman, I had to increase the number of pictures I was showing. This was problematic in that it was difficult to set the timing the way I wanted because the preview feature would only start at the beginning. Previously to having Supaman's music track I had used the song "Water is Life" by Matene Strikes First. I suppose I could have stuck to my original design and uploaded the Lawrence O'donnel clip as a video and that might have been nicer.

The second application of the software I tried was a musical exploration of an Orchestra. The idea was to have the user tap on an instrument and the instrument play a couple of notes. There seems to be a limitation to the software here as it only plays the first time the user taps the image. To add more limitations, it only works on two pictures and then will not work on any subsequent images.

To see my work, download HP Reveal and follow the user joanrunsthrough. Point the HP Reveal camera at one of the following images:

Review of VR apps for the Classroom

I spent some time this week exploring VR applications for the classroom. It took me a good couple of hours to get things started. I have two VR headsets that I am using, a Sytros VR headset and a View-Master deluxe. Each has strengths and weaknesses. If I could combine the strengths of both into one headset, i'd have a great tool with customizable pupilary distance and buttons that work. As it is, I have one that I can see through clearly and the other with working buttons.

This week was labor day weekend and I raced to North Carolina and back for a wedding. This included air travel and a two hour shuttle ride. I thought I was handling my motion sickness pretty well. (Better than the lady who ran down the plane aisle with her hand over her mouth only to have the flight staff announce shortly thereafter that the back bathroom was now out of commission). I didn't get back into town until 3 am, but because I am hardcore, I was in my office work by 7:30 am.)

I loved that I tried out the VR applications in my office because I have a spinny chair and I was able to spin around to enjoy the 360 degree view. I may have enjoyed the apps too much because when I noticed that I'd hit that exhaustion wall around 3:00, I was pretty nauseous. I'm not sure it was all from being tired. I barely made it home before I was losing cookies I didn't even know I had. Looking back on the day, I think my motion sickness was heightened from all the spinning and VRing.

Of all the apps I tried, I loved the Apollo 15 VR the most, or it had the most emotional and cognizant impact on me. I lived through the moon landings, but this brought it home at an emotional level. I worried about being on the moon - and only then realized how worried the astronauts must have been.

I also got to create a Google Expedition. It has me thinking of ways that I might be able to use this in the future. My sister Judy's cancer kicked up unexpectedly, causing her to have to submit to chemo and radiation therapies. While I am so very thankful that modern medicine can fight cancer, I know how disappointing it is for my sister to have to cancel another trip. This time it is her European trip. Wouldn't a nice Google Expedition be fun for a sisters activity night?

Here is the link for the quick Google Tour I made of a trip the kids and I took this summer to some of the sacred sites in southeastern Utah: https://poly.google.com/view/fyY_0pmm7Cc or you can link to it from your phone by scanning the QR code below.