Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Games factory ... the secret ? Templates

I visited the website of QUIA and I found that they have a section to create activities, which are based in simple games (i.e. hangman). The website (http://www.quia.com/servlets/quia.web.QuiaWebManager) do several things, from administration, to create quizes.
(In fact I remember have taken some quizz in the early courses of Edtec made in QUIA in 540 or 541).

What I liked about the activities section, is that the template to create activities (games) are simple to use, seems technologically robust (i.e. display a flash version and a html version, based in the same content).

Their possibilities to create games are: flashcards, matching, concentration (memory), word search, battleship, challenge board, columns, close exercises, hangman, jumbled words, ordered list, patterns, picture perfect, pop-ups, rags to riches (a quiz-show style trivia game), and scavenger hunt.

The templates are very flexible with the use of languages (Activities in 30 languages, from Spanish, French, and German to Japanese, Hebrew, and Latin ) and signs that cannot be create with the keyboard (i.e. square root sign)

They already have a big “library” of games that can be customized, and even you can customizes your own past creations. The cool thing is .... if you choose to, the site creates automatically a copy to edit and customize.

The advanced option includes for instance choose the Number of questions per game (NQ) that you want to use based on your pool of created questions.

I created an activity with the template of hangman and is well though. For me was a good model of templates to facilitate the easy creation of games. Kudos to QUIA ! :-)

You can have a free 30-day trial. I encourage you to explore the site.

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