Games and Controllers With Scratch, MaKey MaKey, and 3D Printing

I first wrote this post a year ago. This past year I revised a couple things as I did the project again, and the revisions will be noted.
We got a Makerbot Replicator 2 last December (now a year-and-a-half ago) and one of the projects I came up with turned out really well, and I think is worth sharing. My 7th graders designed key press controlled games in Scratch, then designed hand-held controllers with embedded switches, and we connected MaKey MaKeys to the leads on the switches for a great game experience. The highlights

Random chatting

Omegle is a website for having text or webcam chats with random people. Though it is simply a website for chatting I have to believe it is a game for reasons I will explain. My 7th grade students just told me about this during a class in which they have been working on making posters about internet safety to put up around our school. The website has as its motto "Talk to Strangers" and the statement "Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like," both of which are behaviors my students are fully aware should be avoided. But as they showed me the website they were clearly excited and having a great time trying it out to see what happens. The most important reason I want this to be a game is that it is a medium for kids to do something their parents are always telling them not to do. My first thought was that it makes the concept of strangers meaningless to them by reducing them to harmless sources of funny conversations. After a lot of exposure to this stuff will they start thinking of strangers on the street as random people to play around with, flirt with, have a crazy wacky time with? But if they treat it as a game by just playing with it or seeing how long they can maintain a chat before the stranger leaves or seeing how many strangers they can surprise or whatever goal makes it fun for them, then they are participating in an activity with its own set of rules that is apart from reality and strangers will still be strangers, to be wary and suspicious of, in real life. That is my hope, and theories about games should bear it out. Of course, there are many reasons for them to avoid this type of activity online at this website and the hundreds of others like it, such as chatroulette, even if they do treat it as a game. An informal study on techcrunch found that 1 in 8 video chats on chatroulette had content that was not suitable for children. The same study found that a little hacking can determine the IP address of the chat partner, giving at least a general idea of your physical location.

Oregon Trail Still Rocks

The computer game Oregon Trail has been around since 1971 and it's still a great game. My 5th graders are having a great time buying, trading and haggling, fording rivers, providing proper burials, and dealing with all sorts of inconveniences of life during westward expansion. After each session with the game I make them add to their online journals, writing about what they learn. It's amazing how excited they get about the details of frontier life. One student said it had been a good day because no one died.

One problem with the game is that Riverdeep hasn't kept up with development of the game for Mac OS X. It won't run without a font called New York 18 and this font is native to OS 9 and doesn't exist on OS X. Fortunately the game is popular enough that people have made theirs available, so you can download and install it here. Or there's another font that worked on my daughter's computer, running 10.3.9, that I'm posting here. I hope someone plans to get this game back into development for Mac.

Questionaut by Amanita Design

Amanita Design has done it again! The same outfit that brought us the Samorost game series has been commissioned (I assume) by BBC Schools to make Questionaut, a similar point-and-click game but this time with embedded questions, resulting in a more conventional educational project. The combination of logical and visual problem solving with factual multiple choice questions is a little strange. The two instructional approaches are at opposite ends of the spectrum philosophically, but the problem solving does turn out to be an excellent motivator for completing the questions. I doubt my daughter would have been interested in answering 40+ questions for her bedtime activity without the beautiful and imaginative quest, even if it is just to get a hat.

Samorost

The Czech Republic-based Amanita Design has just completed the sequel to their game from 2003, Samorost. I'm not really into computer games at all, but I love this and I've gotten my seven-year-old daughter into it--it's quite kid-friendly and she's now obsessed. The designer took photographs of mossy tree stumps and created an alien world in which you must help a hapless little fellow overcome challenges to complete his mission (for example, getting his dog back from some visiting aliens).

I love two things about this game. It's been created with a unique creative vision that invites you to take you time and enjoy the sounds and scenery everywhere you go, similar to the feeling of watching Hayao Miyazaki's Totoro. Second, it's about thinking through problems rather than developing quick mouse skills. There are only two parts in the game that I have to help my daughter with. The rest is just her thinking about how she will create all of the cause-and-effect circumstances to allow the little guy through each challenge. I would encourage my middle school students to play this. I think all kids need practice with this kind of problem-solving, and what better incentive to stick with it than this visually rich environment.

By the way, Samorost 1 and the first chapter of Samorost 2 are free and online. You can download the second chapter for $9.95 (well worth it) and have both chapters of Samorost 2 on you computer. I can't wait for #3.
Link to Samorost 1 and Samorost 2