I think every teacher would agree that they've noticed that there are some words , concepts or grammar points that nearly every student struggles with.
As a personal example being a foreigner, the GA & WA difference seems to be one that gets nearly all of us at first.
So, in these special cases, I propose that we create a serious of apps and interactives that will unstick the brain and allow the course to flow.
To this end I've created one example of this using the TaskMaster word 'Anxiety'. Using the alien from the game I've made a little interactive that has a lot of helpful information on screen, some mnemonics perhaps and a slider that allows the student to take the alien from a very calm state to one of pure anxiety. As they drag slider they are presented with some character acting from our little friend and about a dozen differently worded uses and forms.
However, as I was creating this little sample from scratch, I took the opportunity to fully optimise it and put it on as many machines and in as many different ways as possible.
The results were more than promising.
The actual UNITY file, with its backgrounds, code, textures etc is 1.5 GIGS. But that's the usual horrendous disk squatting.
Creating it as a desktop app (mac or pc) came out as about 85MBs. Not bad, but not something you want everybody to have to download.
Optimising it and placing on a webpage? This is where it got interesting. It took some fiddling, some corners cut and techniques I haven't used in over a decade but the ENTIRE little interactive, exactly as you see above, sits on a webpage for...... 5MBs.
Just to underline that, if we added more animations and words but used the same graphics and character above that size would hardly change! Plus the amount of time the page was loaded, times, length of interaction etc. could all be recorded invisibly in the background.
The futures of these little apps is looking bright; compressed & optimised but very bright.
You can view the online version here (mac & pc browsers)* : ANXIETY_ALIEN_EXAMPLE
*shockingly it sort of works on iphones and ipads too!
As an aside, I'd like to put this on an iMac somewhere in the school and just leave it. See if any of the kids go near it, interact with it and if so, do they then show another student?
Basically slap an alien and a slider on screen and watch what happens. Kids learning by mistake or willingly? Shocking.
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