Now that the project is well underway, original ideas are beginning to percolate. Bianca and Emily suggested that the app should begin with a tour guide introducing the town and project. Several suggestions have been made for the Splash page. Ryan M thinks that it should be a waterfall filling a container - when the container is full, the app is loaded. We are the city of waterfalls after all. Another group thinks the splash page should be a picture of the class having a water fight or of them standing on the front steps while buckets of water are dumped from the window above. When the water hits, the app is loaded. Their ideas are becoming playful
Learners need a great deal of time for ideas to flow. This can't be rushed. It is really only this week that creative thinking has begun. How often do we rush kids through a task and never allow time for true originality and creativity? I'm realizing through this project just how much curriculum driven checklists rob learners of opportunities for creativity.
Learners need a great deal of time for ideas to flow. This can't be rushed. It is really only this week that creative thinking has begun. How often do we rush kids through a task and never allow time for true originality and creativity? I'm realizing through this project just how much curriculum driven checklists rob learners of opportunities for creativity.
Wow, it is amazing how this project is taking off! And, all the people becoming involved... you could have a ready-for-publication paper by the time it is complete! I agree, real life learning doesn't necessarily fit with the curriculum documents... it is sad, because it is where the most learning takes place.
ReplyDeleteHi Class62 - there's a little more technical stuff you need to learn about Splash Screens for iPhone apps now.
ReplyDeleteA splash screen is just an image that's shown when the program is loaded up into memory. For our app, it's not going to take very long at all. Your ideas about an animation are great - but it's not going to be needed because of two important things.
a) iOS (that's the operating system that iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads run on) doesn't let you use animations for a splash screen. For the games that you might have seen on iOS devices, there's a static (ie. no moving) splash screen, and then you might get subsequent screens that ARE animated. We won't be needing that because those kind of apps that take a long time to load use the animation to load A LOT of stuff (mainly animations and audio etc.)
b) Our app is tiny. It's load super fast on a 3GS or iPhone 4. The animation will take a number of seconds to actually make sense when playing back as an animation - so it's just annoying for the user if we insert it up front, since they don't actually need it for this app.
It's a great idea - and useful for other things. I admire your creative thinking. But for this particular app - sorry - we won't need any animations up front to hide the negligible loading time.
- Ian
Hi Class! Hi Ian! Hi Heidi!
ReplyDeleteAsa creator of images, I like to PLAY. I think in order to get the best ideas you have to go through alot of revisions. Think of it as a kind of creative brain storm. Throw out ideas. Someone write them down, then vote on the best one. I like to put things up on the wall and look at them. Go do something else and then go back to the things you created. It's amazing what connections you see when things are up on the wall.
Enjoy the creative process. ; )