Beta Testers Needed! Information Fluency: It's Elementary!

Carl Heine is developing a series of online learning games to teach elementary ages the essentials of search. We're looking for feedback and suggestions as we begin the development cycle.

Here's link to a launch page for two question to query games.

http://21cif.com/flash/challenge/keywordchallenge/index.swf

These are not yet polished. If you want to start over, just refresh the page.

Please post your feedback here?

Thanks in advance!

Dennis O'Connor
Information Fluency Partners

Tags: 21cif, elementary, fluency, games, google, information, keywords, search

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Fran Lo on October 3, 2008 at 4:42pm

This was fun and harder than it looks. My suggestions: 1) Larger type so it's easier for children who are used to seeing bigger text (and for their old fogie teachers who wear bifocals). 2) Look at your vocabulary - some words are pretty advanced for elementary kids (ex: relevant); it's not that I don't want to expand their horizons, I just don't want to stop to do a vocabulary lesson while I want students focused on something else - they get off-task so easily already.

I think my middle school kids would get a kick out of this, too. They LOVE games and challenges.

Fran Lo

Permalink Reply by Dennis O'Connor on October 3, 2008 at 6:06pm

Thanks for the feedback Fran. We'll work on the text size. Since this is a flash application the larger your screen size the bigger it gets. If you maximize your browser (tap F11 on your keyboard) the images and text will get better.

Good call on 'relevant', would related be a better choice?

We have many (as in a whole bunch) of free online learning games aimed at middle & high school. Check out the 21cif portal at: http://21cif.imsa.edu

Thank you so much for your input. We'll be putting up more games in the next few weeks. Feel free to link to them!

Dennis
Information Fluency Partners
Wiredinstructor

You'll find a director of games about searching and evaluating here: http://21cif.imsa.edu/rkit/timed_sc1.html

Permalink Reply by Nathan Ketsdever on October 3, 2008 at 6:52pm

Interesting:
a) Larger type (a la Fran above)
b) The instruction screen includes the bad words after the colon, instead of providing contrast & juxtaposition.
c) When I clicked on the wizard he didn't help, but that may be unique to my Macbook or me or Safari.
d) what if some form of instruction were actually on the playing screen.

Best of luck.

Permalink Reply by Dennis O'Connor on October 3, 2008 at 8:23pm

Thanks Nathan!

Getting feedback from 'fresh eyes' means a lot to us.

Watch this space, we'll be publishing more games soon. Eventually all of this will go on our website:

http://21cif.imsa.edu

Den

Permalink Reply by Dennis O'Connor on October 6, 2008 at 11:29am

New Challenge added: Try the Butterfly Challenge!

Den

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