New Game

I've started a new game, called Where in the World is Carmen Sanfransisco? I think you can easily guess what it's based on (I keep hearing Rockappella sing that in my head). I've been wanting to do this for a while, and now that I'm ready to do it, I have to crank it out and have it ready for next week. Unfortunately, the class I'm designing it for has a record low number of students, but I always believe in starting small. They're also all Spanish majors, so I had to throw out the idea of making some of the clues in each of the three modern languages taught here.

I am excited about this and it is slowly coming along. You won't be able to see much from the link above yet because I haven't added much programming to the buttons. But I'll be working on this a lot over this week and the weekend and hopefully will have something functional very soon!

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week 2009 is quickly approaching. This morning, I turned all of my pictograms into individual posters and sent them to the print shop. I'm breaking down and sharing my favorite, but won't give away the answer.

I sent out an e-mail to all faculty and staff asking for people to "host" a poster and was overwhelmed by the response. I now must write to everyone who responded to let them know who is and is not getting a poster. The decision is entirely based on spreading them around campus as evenly as possible, plus I had fun tying some of the puzzles and plots into various people or what their office does. I'm looking forward to seeing how many people come out to play!

Success

I think it is safe to say that our freshman orientation activity was quite successful. From where I stood, it seemed much less chaotic than in the past, and at least the girls seemed to have a lot of fun.

The only major problem that I know of was that a number of teams (mostly boys) did not want to go through all of the steps if they could guess the ransom note and find the dog. Some honestly thought the goal was to find the dog, others just didn't want to do it. Other than adding one more statement to the initial instructions that you have to do all steps before claiming the reward, I'm not sure how to get around this. I think in the past, these teams just copied other students' booklets. Our current activity does make it obvious if a team hasn't completed all of the steps. However, one of next years' goals will be to find a way to make this problem smaller.