The audience for our program is 9th grade students at the Met
School who
will be preparing for the RI State health examination. The supervising
teacher, Charly Adler, has given us a lot of freedom in the planning of this
project. His only criterion is that the program be engaging for kids who have
grown up being bombarded by multimedia images, or as he put it, "A generation
educated by Jerry Springer." Our challenge is to come up with creative ideas
that will interest the students and get them to actually use the program while
preparing them for this state-mandated examination. Though the RI State
health
exam encompasses many different topics, including sex ed., drugs, alcohol,
nutrition, and exercise, Charly would like us to focus on doing one of these
subtopics very well, rather than covering all of them in a broad, boring
manner. Our tentative plan is to concentrate on the drug aspect of the health
curriculum. Since each student at the Met School has an independant
curriculum, it will be up to them and their advisors as far as how often
and in
what context our software is used.
The Met School is technologically up-to-date, i.e. iMacs and high-end PCs that will run multimedia applications. Based on Charly’s preferences, we are going to use an authoring tool that allows us to incorporate sound, multimedia, and interactivity into our project. The authoring tool must also be cross-platform capable. We are looking toward Director and Flash, but have not made any final decisions. Our timetable is still tentative, but we plan to pretty much follow the dates suggested in the syllabus.
Our first goal is to form a concept of how the program will be structured, and what the included content will be. The Met School is off next week, and in that time we plan to think up several concepts, which we can then pitch to the kids the following week. Based on their input, we will choose a final concept and create storyboards, and then work to realize them in the final product. Perhaps the greatest challenge will be creating an engaging, entertaining, interactive program based around a preset, state mandated curriculum.