Gareth Jones

How does one capture the imagination of today’s learners with a discipline that many of them have already categorised as ‘boring’ by their 11th birthday? How can such a discipline hope to compete with other, more ‘glamorous’ subjects – let alone with all of the other distractions that vie for students’ attention such as video games and music?

At Learnalot we decided the best way to tackle this problem was to fuse maths with video game-style graphics and music together to create role-based scenarios where the student was tasked with solving a particular problem.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
- Benjamin Franklin

Whether saving the world from a giant asteroid, ridding a haunted house of ghosts or recapturing escaped convicts, our learners are presented with a problem and then asked to solve it by using maths skills that are hand-picked from around the curriculum to create believable and valuable activities.

Performance is tracked for teachers and parents to monitor and scores are displayed on ranked leaderboards, promoting friendly rivalry between classmates and peers from around the world. With improving their position on the global leaderboards a powerful incentive, our learners repeatedly play through the activities and games in order to perfect their skills and shave valuable seconds off their times.

The learner is always presented with a fresh problem as the questions and underlying data are randomly generated, so the process is always about perfecting skill and increasing knowledge and never about simply remembering previous answers.

Learnalot allows teachers to forget about preparation and marking and focus on delivering the best possible lesson as each resource also comes with supporting worksheets, teacher’s notes and lesson plans – which have all been prepared by experienced teachers.

You can sign up to Learnalot’s basic package for free just by filling an application form or you can become a subscriber and get access to our exclusive premium content as well. A 20% subscription discount is running until the end of April.

There is also a demo resource available on the website complete with supporting documents should you wish to sample the software without even registering.

With 10% of the UK’s schools already signed up just weeks after launch, Learnalot is proving a hit with teachers, parents and students alike. Register today and see for yourself how successful Learnalot is at engaging learners of all ages with maths.

The online guitar tutoring website, Jamplay, asked us to develop a custom version of Name that Note:PRE to fit in with the scoring structure and look of their existing games.

The whole process took just under two weeks from initial discussions to delivery, with lots of play-testing and adjusting in-between to get the optimum experience.

Head over to the game page at Quak Multimedia for more information.

In the early hours of this morning I got an email from Quak Multimedia’s GameWrapper alerting me to the fact that someone from Uruguay had become the first person to try to steal some software from me. They tried to steal Quak Wordsearch. They downloaded the wrapper and then ran it on their local machine. In fact, they ran it twice.

Thanks to GameWrapper, they were presented with a message that told them that the request was unauthorised and they were prevented from playing.

GameWrapper not only allows for you to specify who can play your content and who can’t, but it also tracks and records usage around the world and alerts you to any unauthorised attempts to run your content.

GameWrapper isn’t listed on the Quak website as it’s not so much a product but more of a tool that I developed to serve its games, but if you’d like the technology to help protect your content then get in touch.

Due to the unsecure nature of Flash, I’ve always been wary of having my work decompiled and its code re-used without my knowledge or consent. By default Flash offers very poor protection against this. While it’s undoubtedly impossible to prevent this from happening completely (despite various security software vendors’ claims), you can make the process so difficult that most people will give up trying.

Of course, not all Flash work will be a target to such piracy but games and elearning products can be targets because the cost and time of developing these resources legitimately can be quite high.

An easy way to protect your work against decompiling is to run your work through an obfuscator. I use Amayeta’s SWF Encrypt, and while a file that has been obfuscated in this way is larger in terms of file-size, the protection that this process offers your code is well worth it. Obfuscating your file like this makes the code almost impossible for a human reader to know what’s going on inside it, much less be able to steal it or change it for their own needs. In a decompiler the code will appear to be nothing more than a load of gibberish, and in fact some decompilers will be tripped up by the obfuscated file and won’t even open it at all.