Gareth Jones

Today’s learners are bombarded with all kinds of high quality digital entertainment; including big-screen movies at the cinema, high-definition video games on their plasmas at home and big-budget mobile video games when they’re on the move. As the quality and the availability of this entertainment increases, learners are expecting other forms of media to keep up and are looking for higher quality resources from which to learn; resources that can satisfy their appetite for impressive audio-visuals while still retaining relevant content.

Most elearning aimed at maths students is dry, static, stale and boring. Other resources succeed in being a little more creative with their ideas, but sadly fall short when it comes to their execution. This is sometimes because they have been developed by maths teachers who know how to do maths, but don’t know how to create engaging software with high production values despite their best efforts and intentions.

Learnalot is an exciting educational portal that fuses the subject knowledge of teachers with top-end software to create case study problems that truly engage and challenge its learners. Each case study is different but they all provide pupils, teachers and parents with problems that are fun to use whilst also being a rich learning experience.

Although we are currently focussed on developing a full suite of Mathematics resources for KS3, we eventually plan to cater for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 as well as GCSE across a number of other subjects and will be making frequent additions to the list of available resources.

Our case studies will be available to educational institutions on an annual subscription basis.

The portal itself is currently in development, as is our first resource, and we aim to have between five and ten resources ready for the launch of the portal early next year.

After seeing Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge, Nourish Interactive asked us to make a simplified version for the 4-10 year old kids who use their website.

The ball mechanics were simplified a little and the wind was removed. The branding was of course changed to reflect that of their website, with the starring roles going to Alex and Jasmine.

For more information and screen-shots, head over to Quak Multimedia.

Name that Note is spin-off that focuses on improving people’s pitch-recognition over the treble clef. This time around, the note in question is played rather than shown, and you must guess the correct note simply from what you hear. You can replay the note as many times as you like, though of course the clock is always ticking so best not hang around hitting the Replay button for too long!

Once you’ve made a guess – whether you’re right or wrong – you’ll get to see the note in question on the stave for a couple of seconds before the game moves onto the next note.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.

A few weeks back we were commissioned by Bug Interactive to develop a viral game for the Active Ashfield initiative and to promote the launch of their new website. The brief was to develop a sports-themed game that featured their two food-based characters (Brocky and Peggy) which would promote healthy eating and an active lifestyle.

The result is Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge, a game that tasks the user with scoring as many conversions as they can within the two minute time limit. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds though, as you have to factor dynamic wind (both in terms of direction and speed) and variable kicking power into your aiming!

For more information and screen-shots, head over to Quak Multimedia.

Quak Wordsearch is an application that allows you to play a different wordsearch game every time you view it. Whenever you load the game it selects at random from a list of words that you have specified and places these words on the grid in random locations. To see this process in action, try refreshing your browser a few times on the game screen!

The application is ideal for puzzle websites, and as it allows for you to print the game out and complete it on paper it is also ideal for use in schools as an after-lesson activity.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.

Name that Note is a Flash game that improves the user’s music-reading skills by tasking them to read music from 2 different clefs through 3 different difficulty levels. The challenge is to correctly name as many notes as you can within a time limit, with the higher difficulty settings giving you more difficult notes to work with in less time. Scores are saved to a leader board to promote friendly rivalry.

The game has proven to be very popular among music enthusiasts and has received very positive feedback.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.