Today we discussed the immersion day. The students highlighted learning to play the game and customising the costumes as good points of the immersion day. The issues we discussed included lack of internet access, problems in viewing the characters during level design with multiple characters, having to wait for other players in co-op mode, teaching younger pupils how to run, jump and grab at the same time when their dexterity is just developing, the reaction time required to play the game and the speed of the game.
Students made good suggestions where we could take the link with Market Place Primary. We expanded on the idea of basing it on a story which the primary class were investigating; Discussed how a racing game could be constructed (e.g. Mario Kart) – there may be issues around controlling the speed of each player; Using Shrek as a basis for the level was suggested: save the princess. They all agreed that tutorial videos for P1/2 class would have to be created to allow them to make their own levels and scaffold early interactions with the game, but felt that the built-in tutorials at the start of the game were good and would be usable by younger pupils. All these points are to be discussed with my Market Place Primary link teacher at our next meeting.
The pupils then investigated whether existing PS2 resources in the department could be used with the PS3. Trial of the EyeToy was successful and stickers can be created for use within the game however the other webcams we had in the department were USB1.1 and the PS3 insisted only USB2.0 connections were allowed; One student found a PS2 to PS3 converter which allows old controllers to be used with the console (link). This may open up the use of a dance mat to control the sackboy character (we’ll investigate it anyway!).
One technical issue which appeared during these trials was corruption of save game data. This resulted in the loss of all progress made by the pupils during the immersion day however it allowed students to experiment with ideas to resolve the problem. None worked, but students were methodical and continued their collaborative working from the immersion day.
