Project Name:The Romans: Religion
Skills: Macromedia Director MX 2004, Photoshop, Lingo
Project (Video Desktop Capture):
Background: 'The Romans: Religion' is an interactive blended learning CD-ROM, which has a heavy focus on game play and harnesses multimedia elements such as images, music, text and sound effects to support the learning outcomes of my chosen subject of The Romans, which falls within the UK GCSE Key Stage 3 teaching syllabus of History. Using Macromedia Director I created this small game as part of my Interactive Media Practice 1 module at University in the first semester of my final year.
Unlike the vast majority of my previous works, this piece was significantly special as it was commissioned by a 'live client'; the client were representatives from the Shelfield Community Academy, a learning institution based in Pelsall, Walsall, West Midlands, United Kingdom, delivering education to its numerous students, who range from 11-18 years of age.
The Academy wanted to strengthen three subjects that they teach at the institution, which are part of the UK National Curriculum, to aid their students’ learning experience; they also singled out a couple of areas within these subjects, which need specialist attention. The three subjects chosen by the Academy were English, Religious Education and History.
After studying History at GCSE and A-Level I opted to create a CD-ROM in this area and from the short-list of topics, which included The Saxons, World War I and II and The Romans, I was already developing a World War II e-Learning artefact in another University module, so I chose The Romans, which is a very rich and vast topic and if I delivered it all in one go through a CD-ROM, it would be non-beneficial, confusing and overwhelming for my user in regards to their learning and so to combat this I pigeon-holed this subject in to one small segment of the curriculum, homing in and focusing on Religion and in particular the Gods and Goddesses, who were worshipped by this ancient civilisation.
After using the CD-ROM, I wanted my target audience of 11-14 year olds to be able to describe that The Romans believed in many Gods and Goddesses, who they viewed as people with special powers. The user should also be able to dictate that these Gods lived as part of a large family and were assigned to a certain group of people or different thing, which they were solely responsible for.
The idea behind the game was simple, I placed the user in to a scenario where they would arrive at the Roman Emperor's Palace and would be greeted by the Emperor's advisor 'Dio (which is the Italian word for God and tied in nicely)', the user would then be identified as an artist who would be responsible for completing a piece of artwork as a sacrifice to the many Gods and Goddesses the Romans believed in. This artwork was a great vase and the user was given the task of placing the correct symbol, which represented a certain thing, by the correct God or Goddesses' name. Get three symbols in the wrong place on the vase and the user would be thrown to the lions by the Emperor.
One of the main areas of the game I was most proud of was the global settings panel; this could appear and disappear by pressing the 'M' key on the keyboard at anytime, but throughout the game I made heavy use of music and this would at times either rise or fall in volume, but the global settings panel would monitor where in the game the user was through a Lingo code I wrote; it would also identify which song was playing and at which volume, so that if they clicked the mute button (whose icon in my game is a 'Lyre', a Roman musical instrument used at the time), the code would always chose the right song setting even if the user had moved on to another section of the CD-ROM.
