-
I created this List.ly list of geography games for students in my sixth grade two-way dual-language bilingual immersion World Cultures classes. Some of these are much better than others. It's been rather difficult for me to find good Spanish resources that align with my state standards (the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) this year. I search through Google Mexico and Google Spain, but many of the resources are for university students and are too advanced for my classes. I know that the resources are available, but they have proven incredibly difficult for me to access. I normally try to have my students create games and presentations that will serve as good resources for other sixth grade classes. They have created presentations and digital stories using emaze, Haiku Deck, Google Presentations, Metta, Tapestry, Weav.ly, and probably a few other tools that I cannot seem to remember. My students really enjoy creating games to share with others using tools like Kahoot! and Zondle. These are all in English except for the GeoGuessr game and a few others, which are essentially language agnostic. Geoguessr my favorite of these, and students can create their own using the landmarks or their home town or anywhere around the world with GeoSettr. This list can also be found at bit.ly/geographygames. I hope that this will serve as a handy resource for teachers and students.
Thanks to Richard Byrne and Larry Ferlazzo for providing valuable resources on the respective blogs that led to this list.
-
Since I've actually been posting a few things here recently, I thought that I'd share a few of my favorite games. I'm a huge fan of games, but I don't get to play them for more than a few minutes on any given day. I'll admit that I'm very fickle; I download a lot of games, try them out, and never come back to them. These are the games that I actually play at least occasionally or am very interested in their potential for education. Most of these are free iOS games, but some are paid apps. I wish I had more time to play these, so I'm posting them here so that others can join in the fun that I'm missing out on. It's also possible that I'm just going crazy making List.ly lists. Also, List.ly lists can be embedded anywhere except apparently in a Blogger blog with a Dynamic Views theme. Guess who uses exactly that?
-
Metta is one of my favorite presentation tools, and there are quite few that I really like. There are many aspects of Metta that make it one of my favorites. The first is that it is simple to learn and begin using quickly. There is a search box located just above your "clips" that allows students to find resources to add without navigating away from the site. The search box finds results in the form of YouTube videos that can be easily clipped to use only a portion, images from Yahoo images, text from tweets using a realtime Twitter search, and audio from Soundcloud.
You can also add your own images as well. When you have completed a clip, you can record your a voiceover for it by clicking on the microphone icon before moving on to your next clip. You can even add a poll or quiz that viewers can respond to before moving ahead in the digital story or presentation.
I like that Metta lets you know the duration of the presentation or story even in the embedded version. It's nice to know how much time I will need to invest in a presentation before I view it. I also really like the availability of the menu items at the top left of the window. The File, Edit, Poll, and Help menus can be helpful for those just moving away from Office products, and I like having an easy answer for locating features for students. The editing tools are really easy for students to learn anyway. Just below the clip, users can toggle video, photo, or text on and off.
Students can also save drafts of the presentation before publishing it and can even receive story statistics after publishing as well. Metta is just an all around great digital storytelling tool. I really like the simple interface and the ability to easily search for resources through media that my students actually use and enjoy.
Metta is available as a Chrome app, a Google Drive app, and an Edmodo app, and of course you could always just head directly to Metta.io. I'll confess that I haven't often utilized many Edmodo apps, so I thought that Metta would be a great one to have my students try this year.
My sixth grade dual-language bilingual world cultures classes were studying the countries of the Middle East, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to try out the Metta app with them. We reserved our school's Chromebook cart, and my student's logged into Edmodo to check their notifications for our assignment. From there, they just clicked on their Edmodo apps and chose Metta. With the Metta app for Edmodo, no login is required, and the app runs in a window on top of the Edmodo interface. I asked my students to create a simple Metta story of life in their chosen country, and they got started right away. Signing up is really quick even without the Edmodo app though.
My students were able to create some wonderful presentations within the 45 minute class period and privately share them with me. They really loved it and are excited to use it again soon. My experience with Metta and the Edmodo app has been nothing but positive. The folks at Metta have been helpful, though we didn't really have any issues to deal with. I suppose that is really my favorite thing about Metta. It's hassle free!
For more information on Metta, follow @getmetta on Twitter, join their Edmodo community, see Richard Byrne's latest post on it, or just log in, and take advantage of the awesome live help feature. A few of my kids did, and they really appreciated the responses they received. -
In the tradition of list posts around the holiday season, I'd like to take a moment to share a few of my favorite things. These are not all the latest and greatest apps and tools, but instead I'm including the apps and sites that I actually seem to open and use daily. So many of the coolest sites and apps that I post about on G+ or Twitter seem to get buried in social bookmarks or in some folder on my devices. I really love all of these things, but I don't have the time to really invest in them. There are just so many amazing apps, tools, and sites available that I have a hard time choosing which I like best. I just end up setting IFTTT triggers to push everything to everything else. This is not the case with the items in the list below. I use these apps and tools all the time and love them all. I hope that one or two may be valuable to you as well.
-
I've was introduced to gamification by Paul Anderson in his TED Talk on Classroom Game Design. Until then, I was just a fan of game-based learning and a big proponent using games to teach students that failure in any facet of life can provide wonderful opportunities for learning. My friend Dave Guymon has written a book on the subject that I highly recommend.
I'm such a fan, in fact, that my class's Twitter handle is "Hijole! Pues..." It loosely translates to "Darn! Well..." I really want to stress to my students that we are all going to make mistakes and make them often, but that's absolutely fine with me as long as we learn from them and continue to improve. I also strive to lower the affective filter in class and encourage them to take risks often.
This year in my 6th grade World Cultures classes, I am trying to gamify everything I can think of. I'm enjoying it immensely, and I feel that my students are as well. However, I feel that I've already learned an awful lot from the things that we've tried that would be considered utter failures by just about anyone involved in education. I'm not going to focus on any of those here; I just wanted to remind myself that it's alright to have those fall-flat-on-my-face moments so long as I learn from them.
One of the aspects of my classroom that I really want to focus on this year is having the students create and make the class their own. I still felt the need before the first day to have a motivational poster or two up, but I didn't plaster them all over the walls the way that I did years ago. I also strategically placed various maps on areas of the walls that needed some masking. Even with these attempts to make my class look a bit more like those of the teachers in my new school that stopped by often, it still looked pretty bare. I was happy about that.
The first week of school, I let my students know that I wanted to make our class into a game. I'd had an idea (It was really Shelly Terrell ;-p) that we would call it Around the World in 180 Days. I used our class Cel.ly to poll the students and to encourage them to join it as quickly as possible. I had used a Google Form to find out if my students had any mobile devices or computers available for them to use at home, and if so, what kind of devices they had. I was surprised to see that many of them actually did, though most were not permitted to bring them to school. I asked them what kinds of games they played and which were their favorites. As I suspected, Minecraft was at the top of the list alongside a few others that I'm sure you could easily guess.
We decided that we would decorate the room Minecraft-style, and I let the students know that we would need to create a foundation for our class before we could begin building. I also believe firmly in building a foundation with my students and getting to know them and their interests before we begin to focus on our curriculum in class. To be completely honest, I had fully expected the students to choose Minecraft, and if they hadn't, I'm sure I would've created a new poll using Forms again to choose which style of game that we would use for our class/game. I'm sure that I would've rigged the poll, and that would've been difficult with Cel.ly. I've followed +Joel "MinecraftTeachr" Levin (@MinecraftTeachr), +Diane Main (@Dowbiggin), @MinecraftEdu, @PCSTech, and quite a few others on G+ and Twitter for a while to learn what has worked for them, but I still don't have much idea what I'd like to do in that area. Regardless, for our foundation, I decided that we would create Minecraft blocks using butcher paper to create our bedrock, land, and water. This is one time when things went horribly wrong.
I intended to have students measure their blocks to be a designated size of 12" by 12". I thought it would be simple. After the first class attempted to construct their blocks in their groups, we had as many sizes of blocks as we did students in class. I scrapped that idea quickly, and created a template for the blocks using Google Draw. Maybe I should say that our classes are 45 minutes long, and during this time of year, they were not really even close to that. I felt that we were not getting enough accomplished in that amount of time. Even using the templates, my students ended up with varying shapes and sizes, but I figured that they were close enough. On the blocks, the students wrote their new class/game "gamer tags" that they would use for usernames for their blogs and various tools we will use this year, and they added lots of information about their cultural traits that we were discussing. We were at least trying to cover the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) that my social studies department chair and other faculty were covering, just in a completely different fashion. Being the only dual-language bilingual social studies teacher affords me a bit of leniency in quite a few realms. Thank goodness for that! Our class is also in Spanish ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent is essentially our "rigorous" testing. No comment.
After we laid our foundation and created "gamer tags", I changed our generic labels for our daily activities. I used Textcraft to change our Objectives to our "Missions", Language Objectives to "Select Language", Warm-up/Sponge Activity/Focus/Engagement thing to "Start Game", Class Information and News to "Communication" and too many other labels to mention. We created a place above a whiteboard to place the name of our game "Around the World in 180 Days: A Game", created class "Leaderboards", created avatars for our characters, placed a sign above the inside of the door to say "Exit? (Y / N)", and made a map of our world to place near the exit routes for fire drills. I'm particularly proud of the yellow compass on the ceiling and cardinal directions that we made sure to place in the correct locations with the help of Google Earth projected on the wall as large as possible. I'm sorry, but I hate tiny interactive white boards. Seven times that day I had to climb all over the room placing the huge arrow and N, S, E, and O (Oeste) letters in just the right spot. It was awesome.
We played Spaceteam in class in order to allow the students to have a voice in creating the rules for our class. I wrote a thing about it over here. It was more fun than an Uncorked Security Hypnodish! If you haven't played Spaceteam, I promise you'll have a great time doing so.
I introduced the classes to Class Dojo, which works as our Leaderboard system, and I used their avatars (Thanks Gwyneth!) instead of the cute little monsters that are provided. Points are only accumulated, though I'm quite tempted to deduct them from some students quite often. They gain points for completing missions, assisting others, bonus time, etc. I will say that it seems like a lot to keep up with; sometimes I just select the entire class and award them points.
We have also been using Habit RPG as our to-do list, and I encourage students to use it to keep track of chores and homework. I've loved it on the web for a while and have been really excited that they now have an Android and iOS app.
I like EpicWin for iOS a lot too, and it serves the same purpose. I just prefer free tools that are device agnostic!
Another tool that we have used in class in Plickers. My classroom has my school laptop, a media projector with a VGA input (no HDMI for my Apple TV, Chromecast, or Chromebook) on a rolling cart, and a document camera that I haven't taken out of the box yet. About 1 out every 6 students has a smart phone; 6 of my 175 students even have iPads! That's awesome, but I also like things that don't require much technology at all. Plickers provides paper clickers for students to anonymously provide near instant feedback to teachers. It's like having students hold up paddles to show their answers to a question, only they can't see everyone else's answers. The app on any smart phone recognizes the codes on the cards and lets the teacher see which students "get it" without "calling anyone out." It even keeps track of each student's responses. I tried it to give an quiz orally while my questions were projected on our wall. This was really cool for me. It graded my students' quizzes for me, and all I had to do was hold my phone up ten times while my students rotated their codes to choose their responses. I could see which students comprehended the concepts completely, and which lacked understanding in certain areas. Most teachers don't have access to the devices that even I have in class or worse, wouldn't even be permitted to use them if they did. We hear a lot about schools that are 1:1 iPads or Chromebooks, but the vast majority of them have little to no access to technology whatsoever. If a teacher has a smart phone, Plickers is a fantastic free tool for them to use.
I fully intend on using 3D Game Lab as our learning management system this year, but the district is trying to get teachers to use Edmodo. I've been assisting many in that endeavor. I love Edmodo, but the whole idea behind 3D Game Lab is to promote gamification. It's a terrific idea. I suppose I'd better think so as I spent a large sum of money on it for the year. I haven't even completed enough missions myself to begin to create my classes at this time though.
I've also been a fan of Zondle for a while and have finally set up classes to monitor student progress and have begun assigning games as homework. I hope to have students create their own games there and with GameSalad, Sploder, Gamepress, TinyTap, Gamestar Mechanic, Scratch, Kodu, Gamefroot, etc. in the near future. My school has a subscription to Brainpop Spanish, Brainpop ESL, Brainpop, and Brainpop, Jr. that I am incredibly grateful for. The Game Center has been fantastic for my students already this year, and I love that it's free. I know that the full suite is incredibly expensive, but it really is great. Also, with the amounts of money that Districts waste on junk, I'm fine with the price. I'm also really happy with the Photoseed for Minecraft app for iOS that lets me hide student faces and add lots of Minecraft stuff to student pictures, so that I can share them on our @hijolepues class Twitter and Instagram until I can ask for parent consent to have photos and videos published publicly. My District needs a new release form rather than using the directory information form that even I would decline after reading. Photoseed for Minecraft is fun even if you don't have this issue; I think everyone in my classes would actually prefer to be Minecrafted.
I really like Class Badges by James Sanders as well and hope to use it in class this year too. As long as I'm helping the teachers at my school to start using Edmodo, though, I'll just be using the badges there. I love that you can "steal" them from other teachers to use and that there are teacher accounts dedicated to creating and sharing badges with others. Just search "badges" under Teachers to find them.
We've also used some of my favorite tools ever, InfuseLearning and LiveSlide by Atlas Learning, a bit in class this year. I definitely prefer to use those and our class Celly (sometimes Chatzy or Google Docs for chatting) for gathering student responses, but we have had quite a bit of fun with the Space Race in Socrative. It's great for group competitions.
One last thing I'd like to mention is the music that we have listened to in class. I love all kinds of music and am passionate about it. I was just introduced to chiptune and the various subgenres of it over the past year. It is basically 8-bit synthesized music that to many of us reminds us of the video games and arcades from our younger days. I've become a fan of BitBurner from researching educators using Minecraft on Twitter (This is how I found him).
Next week, we will be studying landforms, and the students are excited to be using Minecraft to create and share them. This ought to be a lot of fun!
I feel like all this might be a tad too much (for a non-gamer like me anyway), but the kids are learning and are enjoying themselves an awful lot. I'm getting so many Minecraft pictures, cards, foldable "Creepers" and "Steves", and stuff that I don't have the heart to tell them that I've never spent more than 10 minutes playing it. I purchased the iOS app, but... meh. I'm really not into video games. It's all about them and their learning. Thanks for reading more of my rambling ad nauseum! I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about how our class can better incorporate Minecraft and gamification in general in our classroom.
These are some of the resources that I will continue to be inspired by:
I really appreciate all that these folks do. Thanks, y'all!
-
I wanted to start off our year in 6th Grade World Cultures by introducing my students to something new and getting them excited about virtually travelling around the world exploring as many cultures as possible this school year. I thought that a fun way to accomplish this goal would be to introduce them to augmented reality. I hope to use quite a few apps and tools this year, and I've been really excited about the potential of AR in the classroom since I began teaching an 8th grade Computer and Multimedia Technology class in the 2010-2011 school year.
The students in my classes had to tell me a little bit about themselves by writing a few sentences on the banner attached to a small plane on a coloring page. I know that they are 6th graders, and this may seem a bit juvenile, but I wanted them to think about places in the world that they would like to visit. I asked them to tell me one country that they would like to visit using the simple prompt, "My name is ________, and I would like to visit _________. One thing I know about (this country) is that..." I wanted to leave it as open-ended as possible.
I then asked them to color the plane and the page in any fashion that they would like. Just to make the activity a bit more relevant to the actual subject matter that we will be covering, I also asked them to include a flag of the country that they would like to visit on the plane itself.
I suppose I've failed to mention to you, and I intentionally failed to mention to the students, that the plane would "come to life" through the use of an augmented reality application called ColAR for iOS and Android devices. Obviously, a very large percentage of my sixth grade boys had little interest in investing their time in doing a wonderful coloring job on a plane for their World Cultures class; they are sixth graders after all. I allowed all of the students to complete their planes at home to their liking and return them to class the following day. It was not until that time that I gave my students the information to join my Cel.ly cell that I intend to use as a tool for parent communication this year. The information was included in my letter home to parents that I sent home the previous day, but I thought that the students might need a bit more motivation to get their parents to sign up. I thought that the ColAR app might provide that motivation.
I pulled out my iPhone 4, opened the ColAR app, and began to show a few of the students that I could tell had worked very diligently to color beautiful small engine planes about how their planes could jump off the page and begin flying, turning, and doing flips in midair with this free app (The plane page only works with the paid version). I got the reaction that I wanted. The looks on the faces of the students that I showed it to piqued the interest of everyone around, and soon all of the students at that particular group of desks were gathered around. The oohs and aahs and general excitement could be heard in the nearby rooms, I'm certain. I made sure to allow all of the students that had done a great job on the planes to get to see their planes in the air before I spoke to the students as a whole.
I told them that I wanted to recognize the great work that many of the students had done on their planes and that I plan to spend time lauding the amazing things that they would be doing in class as much as possible this year. I talked a bit more about my expectations for our class, how I'd like for it to be as much like a game as possible, and how I'd like to make use of the "learning devices" they had safely hidden in their pockets as often as we could. I then told them that I'd be sending a link to the free ColAR app as our first text or message on Cel.ly and gave them the simple instructions to sign up for the texts, emails, or messaging on the app. I also gave them all the ColAR bird coloring page that works with the free version of the app. I told them that they could give it to their little brothers and sisters to show them the app later that evening.
I had forty parents and students sign up for the Cel.ly cell the first night, and I had already scheduled a message with the link to the ColAR site and apps to be sent at 7:00 pm. Of course, I included a thank you message to parents for signing up for the texts as well.
Many students came back the next day ready to show me the birds that they created themselves, and others told me how they had shown the app to their little brothers and sisters and how amazed they were when they saw the bird come to life. They thought that it was hilarious that the bird actually ate the worm.
I believe that the first day went really well overall. Many of the students were excited about coming to class the next day. They knew that I had high expectations for them and that I would attempt to recognize outstanding work and improvement. I made connections with a lot of the parents. The students saw that I was excited to have them in my class and travel around the world with them without ever leaving our classroom. I'm looking forward to a fantastic year.
-
Spaceteam is a free game for iOS and Android devices created by Henry Smith at Sleeping Beast Games that allows multiple players using the same wifi to control a spaceship by executing various technical commands. Players manipulate the controls in order to complete the level and move on to the next. David Craddock of Touch Arcade described the game play in a post from April.
"The first thing you should know about Spaceteam is that it only supports local co-op play. Unless you've got a few friends handy, the app just sits there, as out of reach as a a four-stroke plucker. The reason for the co-op only play became obvious as we entered our first game. Each player receives a control panel littered with dials, buttons, and sliders. An instruction appears on your screen, telling you to use a certain control. Maybe you have that control, but maybe you don't.
If not, you'll need to shout out the instruction--set some dial to 5, enable or disable some switch, and so on--and hope the friend who does have that control can take action before time runs out. All the while, your friends are also receiving and yelling instructions while working frantically to complete instructions you and others are jabbering on about. Survive one sector and you progress to the next, receiving a new randomized control panel just when you were starting to feel comfortable with the last one.
A few sectors in and the action the turns fast and furious, turning Spaceteam sessions into rollicking bouts of shouting, laughter, and frantic screen mashing. Some of the controls have real names, but most are pure made-up techno jargon; you'll have as much fun shouting out "Flush the four-stroke plucker!" as you will actually flushing the thing. Many sectors also throw anomalies at you, such as replacing text with symbols--"Enable the thing that looks like a directional pad!"--and warp holes that make your screen undulate like a belly dancer.
Panels pop off, sludge oozes over your controls, and electrical shorts render some panels unusable. You can wipe away the goop and slide panels back into place, forcing you to juggle making repairs, twisting your phone upside down to escape a warp hole, completing instructions, and belting out orders. It's a riot and an absolute blast."
David is right. It's a whole lot of fun. I think it could also be a wonderful team building activity for students in class, teachers returning to school, or any group whatsoever. I've seen a lot of great posts about "icebreaker" activities that make use of digital tools, including this one from Aditi Rao at TeachBytes and this one from Med Kharbach at Educators Technology, but I think that Spaceteam could be a really fun way to get students to work together and strategize collaboratively in a very short time frame. My assignment will be for the groups to create a product recommending five strategies for Spaceteam gameplay. The final product could be anything really. I will require them to use a Google document to collaborate on an outline of the product, but they could create a video or presentation using any tool they would like.When the game opens, you need to turn a dial to begin play. Spaceteam will search for others with the app open and find three other players. In a class of thirty students, students will not even know who the other players on their team are. There is a setting to create private teams that can be accessed by tapping Upgrades and Experiments within the game, but I don't think I will let them know that at the beginning of the activity. I know it will be utter chaos, but it will give everyone a chance to see the game in action. I know this will fail miserably, but I think that's the point. They will need to fail first in order to learn and become successful. I will then have them create Private Team names for their groups of four and show them where the setting is in the game that allows them to only connect to others with the same team name. I'm sure that I cannot do this on the first day. We will need to create avatars (Thanks, Gwenyth Jones!) for our Edmodo and 3D Game Lab accounts first anyway.There are some other cool options in the Experimental features that I hope they notice when setting their Private Team names. Massive Mode supports up to eight players in a single game. I can only imagine how difficult that would be. In Mystery Mode, six or more players beam up together and must find their teams after the game starts. Deterministic Mode is suitable for competitions, which are only available through a 99 cent in app upgrade. There are a few of these paid upgrades including Challenges, Ships (new control panels and ship designs that include a Steampunk ship), Outfits (new outfits and accessories for your crew), Symbols (new Logographic Malfunction symbols), and a link to purchase the awesome Soundtrack in iTunes.Once they are able to play on their Private Teams, my students will be able to begin formulating strategies that will improve their game play. Hopefully, the higher order thinking skills and metacognition required to complete the project will be evident when we share our products. The students will definitely need to collaborate and will get to know each other pretty well in a short amount of time.
After the students present their strategies, I plan to mention that we haven't set any class rules yet and that the strategies for collaborative gameplay could be easily adapted to become our rules for class this year. I expect/hope that these strategies will include the classroom rules that I would like my classes to abide by.
1. Be respectful.
2. Be prompt.3. Be a good listener.
4. Do the best you can.
5. Be positive.
6. Prepare to receive instructions! ;-)
I will take the best "strategies" from the students, adapt the language to fit our classroom rules, and add them to a Google form so that the students may vote on our class rules. If I need to do so, I may have to vote on the doc a few time myself to make sure that they class rules that I would like to have make it to the top of the results. Don't tell them that though! Through this activity, I hope that my students learn to collaborate more efficiently and feel as if they have a voice in creating our classroom culture and climate. The rules are for the students, and I feel that they will be more likely to follow them if they create them.
I love everything about this game from the look of the crew members and ships to the shaky logo flying through space to the trippy music and sound effects. I love that you can play with either an Android or iOS device as well. The music has even inspired a cover on YouTube. It's just so cool! Henry Smith has done an amazing job. I think my students will have an awesome time getting to know each other by using their higher order and critical thinking skills to create a tool for other Spaceteam players to learn strategies that will help them become a better Spaceteam crew. Have you tried Spaceteam? Do you have any ideas how this can go more smoothly? Please share in the comments, or hit me up on G+ or Twitter!
Henry also has an online store to purchase some very cool t-shirts if you're as big a nerd as I am. He also accepts donations to help him create new games. I made sure to purchase every in app add on since I love the game so much. The Steampunk theme is pretty awesome.
-
I recently held a professional development session on management tools for PBL classes. We created this Symbaloo for teachers to "remix" and use as a resource. There are lots of resources in our Google document (the first tile) as well as a link to the Buck Institute's Freebies page, my PBL Tools edshelf, tools for student collaboration, presentation tools, Ginger Lewman's Livebinders and links to other Symbaloo mixes that Joelle Dulaney shared during the day. I ran out of tiles, so Mural.ly didn't make it into the mix. There are many more tools that I'd like to share, but this is a start.
I also left off Wonderopolis since it's not really PBL related, but you can remix the Wonderopolis Symbaloo here. -
On Saturday, May 18th, 2013, Matthew Lahey and I showed Andrew Stillman's Doctopus Apps Script to a group of teachers at the Texas Google Summit. We broadcasted the session live via a Hangout on Air and created a blog site with lots of resources on using Doctopus and more of Andrew's scripts. We also included a Google Doc of collaborative notes and a link to the youpd.org site where video tutorials for all of the scripts can be found. Check out the site, and say thanks to Andrew for all of the great things he is doing to help make teachers' live a lot easier.
-
I've gotten to spend a lot of time this year introducing teachers and administrators to the Google Chrome browser and Chromebooks. I talk a lot about its speed, the ability to sync across devices, apps and extensions from the Chrome Web Store, the omnibox, the fact that it allows me to make any computer my own in a matter of seconds, and everything else that makes Chrome awesome. Until recently, I've failed to introduce folks to another feature of Chrome that I love. Google Chrome Experiments are "beautiful, magical, crazy things" that talented artists and programmers develop using HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and WebGL. Javascript is awesome, and these experiments promote creativity and inspire developers to create new exciting tools for the web.
Since I've failed to show some of these experiments with a lot of the great folks I've met this year, I'd like to take a few minutes to do so here. The first experiment that I tried out with a group of teachers is Super Sync Sports. It lets up to four players race by using their phones to virtually run, cycle, or swim. When you visit the site, a character that looks an awful lot like Steve Prefontaine appears, and you are prompted to choose an event. You can then choose to play alone or with multiple players. Next, you sync your phone with the game by opening g.co/super on Chrome and entering a code on your mobile device. Once you and your opponents enter your codes, you are ready for the challenge. I think I had the slow Prefontaine in my first race, because I lost by quite a bit to another teacher. Check out the video below to get a better idea of the interface of the experiment.
Geoguessr is the experiment that prompted me to write this post. I was introduced to it about a week ago by Yonatan Zunger and Peter Vogel on Google+ and Twitter. It is a game that requires you to use a street view Google map to determine the location on a world map. The closer your guess is to the actual location on the map, the more points you receive. I'll warn you; this is addicting.
The Peanut Gallery is a nice experiment for students to use. It was created to show off Chrome's Web Speech API that converts your speech into text. Students can create a silent film just by talking and then share the video clip with others. It's simple and a lot of fun!
Roll It! lets you play Skeeball from your phone and has been very popular with the students that I have shared it with. It really is a lot of fun!
World Wide Maze lets you turn your favorite site into a 3D maze, and then find your way out using a mobile device.
Gestures + Reveal.JS was created by a high school sophomore by combining webcam-based gesture recognition with Hakim El Hattab's reveal.js. This is a bit like having a Leap Motion before you can actually get one.
The Wilderness Downtown is a Chrome experiment that allows you to interact with an Arcade Fire music video for "We Used to Wait" from Chris Milk.
Easy Way Subtitles uses Google Translate technology to provide subtitles for Brazilian TV in any language. It works on mobile or desktop and was created by Easy Way Language Center.
Responsive Typography is a proof of concept about how capturing the user with a web camera can be used to adjust the font size for any given reading distance. What a great idea! When I taught Video Production, we needed to adjust the font size on teleprompters for students depending on how far away from the camera they were sitting. A tool like this would have come in handy.
Tiny Monsters is a 2D game, written with Javascript using ivank.js library. The goal is to cut off parts of a polygon to make it smaller while avoiding the tiny monsters inside. I had students name the polygons as the cut them. It was difficult for them, but they had a lot of fun.
Webcam Toy is or was actually a Chrome experiment! I know many of us have the Chrome app, and kids love it! It allows you to use your webcam with over 70 types of effects and filters.
Dia de Los Muertos lets you "dress up" for Mexico's Day of the Dead. This has been a fun part of our annual celebrations.
Balldroppings allows you to draw lines on the screen to make the bouncing balls move around your screen. Every time that a ball hits a line, a musical note is played. It's more fun than it sounds.
Chrome Web Lab is a set of 5 Chrome experiments that are a lot of fun.
The Bravest Man in the Universe is a mobile interactive music video featuring Bobby Womack. Check it out!
Racer lets you race others using your mobile devices.
Launch Video for Racer: A Chrome Experiment from Mixtape Club on Vimeo.
The Exquisite Forest
Um... See the video.
The Hobbit is not available yet, but the preview is worth checking out.
Zygote Body (formerly Google Body) is a Chrome experiment that is fantastic for anatomy or biology teachers and students.
Peer Puzzle is an experiment in realtime collaboration using mobile device. A common focus in modern technologies is their ability to enable people to communicate remotely. However, these same technologies could be used for the exact opposite. The goal of this experiment is to set up a limited medium for communication, and use it as scaffolding for people to use traditional means of communication to solve a shared problem. Peer Puzzle is intended for mobile devices but works on any device with an accelerometer.The Tweetopia Hash Tag Visualizer is a really cool way to display tweets for conferences, events, etc. It was created by Scott Garner. He's awesome! I could spend all day talking about all of the cool things that he has created.
3 Dreams of Black is another interactive film. This one was created by Chris Milk and some folks at Google. This one is sweet!
Last and probably least is Chrome Accordion. Play your Chrome browser as an accordion by resizing it. It's fun for a minute or two. Alright, one more. Actually, Coca-Cola's Sticky Hand is not really a Chrome experiment, but it's really fun when you are bored.
These are just a few of the many Chrome experiments that I like to share with students and teachers (more often now than in the past). Check out some of the many posts about the interesting ones. You can also scroll through them here. I'd love to hear about the cool experiments that you find. I also recommend following Chrome Experiments on Twitter to find out about new interesting experiments.
.jpg)
