The Adventure Creator
£2.99
Pros
- Encourages imagination, structure and creativity
- Great to help inspire writing
- Help develop coding skills
- Multi-media import
- Supported by in-class materials
Cons
- Erm ... none!
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Previous readers will be aware that we are fans of adventure books, which allow children to read and choose the options and destinations of the characters in the book. These books have been brought to life by the apps Starship Traveller Adventure Book or Fighting Fantasy: Island of the Lizard King, for example. For the reader, they are is charge of their own destination, making regular choices throughout the story, and prove popular with children who are establishing their reading habits.
Such books were popularised by Ian Livingstone, and are still available in traditional formats (click here to view on AmazonUK). Using the enthusiasm of children with such stories allows an opportunity to create their own adventure stories, and now app developer, makemoremusic, has released a coding iPad app that allows for such stories to be created easily using the technology offered on the popular tablet.
The Adventure Creator (TAC) makes it easy to create interactive adventures on the iPad with a simple to use, intuitive interface. Create your own worlds and add images and objects. Add interactivity through a simple programming matrix. Play your games and share them easily with others via airdrop, any cloud based solution, or email!
TAC allows you to add your own objects, descriptions, verbs and conditions giving you limitless possibilities for adventure game creation. Be imaginative and creative with the puzzles and challenges you put into your games!
TAC offers exciting ways for teaching coding concepts through its simple to use coding matrix, but can be used to simply create wonderful worlds with images with limited interactivity for very young children. The developers have also created a series of tutorials and classroom project ideas to help teachers get going (click here to view).
TAC features: text and icon interaction, animated icons, a simple and intuitive coding matrix, add your own locations, graphics, objects, verbs, markers, counters and conditions.
The app is all about imagination, creativity and creation. We would suggest that pupils are familiar with adventure books to help them understand the basic rules of creating, and the authors stress how important the planning process is in mapping out a story before the iPad is introduced. Using apps such as Popplet (iPad Link) can be useful for this.
Once all the elements are together, the app is easy to use, but planning, refining and creativity is key. In this respect, we think this is a fantastic app, which encourages cross-curriculum opportunities (computation thinking; coding; writing), and it will be interesting to see where the developers taking this app in the future.
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