PCC site

After the success we’ve had with implementing the Bugle site using WordPress and a custom theme, we are now looking at doing the same thing with the PCC site.

The issue with this at the moment is that the account we have with UK2.net only affords us one mySQL database (as I understand it, the UK2 support sites are terrible).

Game Based Learning Conference & Bugle site

The Game Based Learning Conference was a mixed bag. The vast majority of the conference seemed focused on using off the shelf games with KS1, 2 & 3. There was little in the way of examples of what was going on in the commercial of higher/further education sectors.

That said there were a couple of talks that were of use. The talk by Graeme Duncan of Caspian Learning highlighted the ability of games based learning to enable “safe failure” illustrated by a simulation that had created allowing Army officers to run through the setting up of a vehicle checkpoint. Should the officer get the procedure wrong they can see what the consequences of that would have been without putting themselves or their men in danger. Although not to the same extreme this is something we are hoping to achieve with the ARG.

The other talk that I found incredibly useful was that by Dr Jacob Habgood, Head of Serious Games at Sumo Digital. He spoke about making the learning content intrinsic to the game by incorporating it into the gameplay mechanisms. Again this is something I am hoping to achieve with the ARG.

I’ve been playing around with the Bugle site this morning, after noticing that the theme we are using (Mimbo – excellent theme) doesn’t tie in with the d/m/y settings on WordPress. After some fishing around on the internet I found out how to change this and went through the php files to alter it. It wouldn’t be great for the suspension of disbelief if a British newspaper site was using American date formats! I’m also looking at tieing the site to Twitter so that is tweets when a new story is uploaded and adding an advertisement widgit, initially to help tie the site to the Porthampton City Council site, but perhaps in future this could be a source of revenue to sustain the unit.

WordPress up and running on the Bugle site

I’ve got WordPress up and running on the Porthampton Bugle site. We were initially going to use a free theme called Slickpress but on installing the theme on the server it didn’t seem to want to work properly. Rather than spend ages wading through the php and css for the theme I decided to look at what else was available and found a theme named Mimbo, which seems equally as good. I have now installed this on the server and will be playing around with it a bit to see how it looks with a few posts thrown in.

This, the Phoenix site, and the PCC site are all live in their current forms but will probably be tweaked further. Trying to sort out the email addresses for the various sites atm, UK2.net are not being particularly clear with their support on how to go about this ¬_¬

Also, off to the Game Based Learning Conference 2009 later in the week, hope to come away with some ideas that we can implement into the game.

WordPress for the news site?

I’ve been researching into how best to create the news website for the ARG I’m working on with my relatively limited web design skills. The best route I’ve found seems to be to use WordPress and use a free custom theme I’ve found to get the geneal styling of a newspaper website. I’ll then adjust the CSS in order to fit it to our needs. I’ve learnt that you can upload WordPress to a webspace on your own server which seems pretty easy (although obviously I’ve yet to try it) or just host it on WordPress.com and have a purchased domain name point at it. Either way this seems a very useful way of creating content without having to slog through all the web design stage. It should also make it easier for whoever is involved in running the unit to upload new news stories to help progress the game.