Over the summer and most of the fall I've been working on an app. It's a game that teaches pre-readers the parts of words. This has been a fun challenge to take on.
Daisy's Quest was first made in the early 90's. It won various education awards and was quite popular. (If anyone of you were learning to read in the 90's I'd love to hear whether or not this game helped you learn.)
It has been out of circulation for more than 10 years now, but they decided to give it an updated look. At first their thoughts were basically to replace the art, but as I looked at it I knew that more than just the individual bits of art had to change. After conversing with the proprietors we decided to completely revamp the look.
In the old 90's version in all the scenes there was a large blank area. The big empty area was so that the little pictures of the objects could flash up on the screen without competing for attention from the background. One of the things that I changed was to have the scene completely illustrated and then have the objects framed in with a box to separate it from the background. It gives the game a cohesive look throughout.
In the game the child has to go to different areas of the country side to learn the different parts of the words. The word is spoken and a picture of the word pops onto the screne. Here are a few sneak peeks to some of the places they can go. These are not the full scenes but rather just glimpses.
They will be test running this next week. If any of you out there with small children would like a free copy of the game, let me know. I will get in contact with you. By the way it is a first come, first serve basis. They need about five more testers. And this game right now is only for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.