I have been wanting to get my PE and Primary pals chomping on this idea for just over a week now (where has the time gone). Remember Pac Man, of course you do. Sufficiently iconic to be a Google doodle, this beloved arcade giant has been hacked.
Add a little imagination (well augmentation) GPS and maps and you have Spherie, on OS. Walk the streets of your location and collect the yellow spheres, cherries if and when they appear, over a 14 days game period. Spherie will calculate the points allocated to that specific sphere you just collected, adding points to your total Spherie score shown at the top of the app. As yet, I have not encountered any ‘ghosts’ although this is an obvious feature and would encourage players to walk new routes as well as adding a sprinkle or game play. Just make sure you are travelling at a reasonably slow pace as there is a speed limit, that mean’s no bike or car powerups. From what I can tell, you can compete with others in Game Center and it would not take too much effort for a school to organise a leaderboard. What I envisage is a pupil walking or fittest challenge, with measurable performance or Spherie score determining the winner. One issue to negotiate is the in-game payment to unlock of the large dot point scoring. One issue to think through.
One of the more physical games based learning activities I have stumbled upon.
Spherie – Teaser Trailer from Peter Druska on Vimeo.
So far my experiences with the Spherie have been a little buggy, the page data loading, the spheres appearing, but do stick with the app, I am sure these are merely ‘growing pains’ will get ironed out. Certainly Spherie developer Peter Druska noted the difficulties he has been facing ironing out ‘some very hard to find’ bugs based on the GPS sensor, but in the same breath he is confident we can look forward to new updates in this summer.
Even with that, this mornings experiments with Harry (3, nearly 4) was a great deal of fun, most certainly in his eyes and words. An ipadio moblog is pending and will hopefully be live soon.
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