BETT 2009 - 2Simple 2Do It Yourself (DIY)

It was nice to catch up with Alan Yeoman at BETT 2009. Alan now works as an educational consultant with 2Simple. 2Simple make lots of great stuff and I was instantly impressed with the software that Alan showed me called 2Do It Yourself (or 2DIY).

Among other things the software provides basic games design tools for young children. It’s really creative, easy to use and could introduce young people into a whole variety of learning experiences including design, rules, creativity and competition. The interface is very easy to use and I am sure the software will appeal to many teachers.

I had a quick go at making a game last night.

First of all I picked a game template from the options menu:

The game I picked is a bit like the old fashioned space invaders. You can apply rules to objects to gain points or to loose points.

The next step was to draw my background (notice the care I took with the trees!). I could have also imported an image if I had wanted to.

I then picked the objects to fall from the sky. The theme of my game is ‘Open Source’ so I up-loaded some ‘open source’ and some ‘non-open source’ logos to the game. I set rules against each object so that if you caught an open source logo you gained points and if you caught a non-open source logo you lost points.

Then I designed my ‘catching’ object. I picked a hand form the clip art bank.

I then set some rules about game timing (you just pay for a minutes) and added some sound.

Finally, I created a start page and you can play my finished game below! How simple was that, what a great resource!

To play the game you will need flash installed on your computer. Click start and then use the left and right cursor keys to move the hand to catch the logos.

 

Porchester Junior School has also up-loaded some 2DIY Games to their excellent classroom website.

Comments

[Renewable Energy]

What a cool piece of software!

The kids are gonna enjoy using this. Thanks for sharing this with us.