This is the first week that we have used NWN2 with our S1 pupils. Although only two of us attended the training sessions with Judy and Cathrin all the teachers in our department are going to be teaching the software to all our S1 classes.
On an extremely positive note ALL my class came armed with their permission slips signed ready to start!
As an introduction we let them play the Village Adventure module to familiarise themselves. None of my class knew of the game so this was a useful exercise before starting to look at the Adventure Author toolkit. On the whole, aside from the odd machine crashing and some pupils being unsure of what to do with the game then becoming frustrated it, it seems to worked. I am looking forward to next week to see what they will do when they are let loose to create their own worlds!
Although we are only just beginning the Adventure Author project with all our S1 classes, I have been using my S6 Digital Gaming Class as guinea pigs for the project since December. From a teaching point this has been great as I have had the chance to try things out and learn from mistakes along the way so I am more confident about the whole thing. From pupil point there has been mixed results. Some of the pupils are keeping me on my toes and asking how to do things that have me stuck - "How do I create a waypoint so I can teleport Miss?" (now I know I asked exactly the same question when I was at Heriot Watt so I will have it written down somewhere!), others are still getting to grips with basics. Having said that most of them have some kind of area complete with conversations and the odd transition. Today we started to do a little scripting which worked well, even the pupils I was dubious about managed to produce some working code. I may use some of the S6 pupils work as demo modules for the S1 to see what it is possible to create. It may also be an idea to have the S6 pupils as classroom helpers during the project - they need a bit of persuasion though.
Sheila
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I like the way you have set the project up, easing in via your 6th year students to build your confidence (particularly sensible as you have other staff to train, too), and I do hope the mentoring possibilities take off - a great idea!
ReplyDeleteLetting the children explore the game world first is also really sensible, to give them a feel of the end product. I'm impressed that they all brought their forms back straight away! Looking forward to hearing how they get on with the toolset in session two.
Cathrin