Katie de Lange
Cactus Cars – a 'Confident Kids' computer game
Hillcrest High School
Year 11 ICT Programming
Teacher: Jenny Baker
Well-designed educational computer software ensures children enjoy learning and feel a sense of success straight away. It gives them time to work at their own pace to learn skills and knowledge to become confident kids. There is a need for well designed educational software in homes and schools that meets specific learning needs of young people.
Katie's challenge was to investigate young people's specific learning needs and plan, design, programme, test, and implement a computer programme to meet those needs."
Katie decided to create a computer game that would help her sister, a Year 6 student, improve her recall of Basic Facts Mathematics. Classroom tests of Basic Facts require students to answer 100 multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction questions in three-and-a-half minutes. Katie's sister wanted to improve her scores.
After identifying key factors likely to be important to the success of the project and interviewing stakeholders, Katie developed an initial brief and used this to refine her ideas and arrive at several possible design concepts for her game. Stakeholder feedback was used to select one concept for development. Katie then produced a refined brief for a computer game she called Cactus Cars.
The game's scenario involves the player competing with a fellow passenger for water as they travel through a desert in a car. Correct answers to maths questions earn a drink. Katie used Adobe Photoshop to create the graphics for her game and the Visual Basic programme to animate them. In designing Cactus Cars, Katie had to consider the legislation and regulations, such as the Copyright Act, and the Privacy Act, along with codes of practice and ethics.
Stakeholder feedback
"I liked playing this game, it's fun. I think that if I play it enough I will be able to remember my maths. I could find everything I needed and I thought the cars were very pretty especially their colours. It was very fun to play. The bike questions were challenging; they made me want to play it again."
Teacher comment
Katie's technological practice was excellent. She was a first-time programmer designing an outcome to meet the needs of other people. Fifteen year-olds normally consider their wants rather than others' needs! But Katie didn't take the easy way out. She worked hard trying to adapt the capabilities of the programming language to meet the requests and preferences of her sister's class.