Is it a given that kids can only be entertained with excitement, clever puzzles and captivating characters? Or maybe it’s that adult training happens to land more around the area of “here’s how to refinance your home using our 15 step mortgage calculator”. The following projects are made for kids, but more often these days we’re looking to get creative characters, engaging environments and unified (short & to the point) goals that are memorable and have long lasting educational value into adult training.

This first piece is the NCFL (National Center for Family Literacy) “Literacy House”. I had the pleasure of working with a great idea of theirs, and helped turn it into a living breathing experience with a variety of illustrations, photos and multiple voice overs. I got to bring in my 2 year old daughter Elena into the project (that’s her voice you can hear throughout) while I played the role of daddy (how fitting!).

Users can explore a house and simply roll over and click different areas of interest to learn about various ways you can incorporate literacy into every day of your child’s life. Rarely do I find a project I can bring into my own personal life, but this one honestly works with kids – there are a ton of ideas and suggestions throughout, so take a look!

Our other two project launches (both with NCFL and Smithsonian) are the “How would you feel” Greensboro Sit Ins simulation, which teaches the user about various perspectives of a variety of people throughout a sit in. And finally the Find  a Flag is more along the lines of where’s waldo for U.S. flags – explore the environment to discover fun facts about the U.S. flag, and if you find them all you get a surprise at the end!

 The projects are filed under Educational Games and Basic Simulations in our eLearning portfolio, check them out today!

TOTAL MONSTER DESTRUCTION!

Take on an entire city of passive aggressive inhabitants as no one fights off your giant laser attack! Upload a photo of a friend or hated enemy, make up your own monster name and choose one of three exciting monsters: Roboto… The Slime or El Chupacabra!

Fast paced action mixed with a stunning custom soundtrack from our friends at www.scorechamber.com makes one intense monster destruction game! Send links to your grandma, send links to your kids, just send some links!!

Start your game at: http://clearlytrained.com/games/tmd/ today!

A very rough draft

The project idea initially was to create a sushi-eating interaction, where you could take on the role of a person shoveling various types of sushi into their mouth. Over three weeks it went from that into a giant monster attack destruction game, where users control laser eyeballs of a giant robot, slime, or chupacabra as it destroyed the giant 3d city.

We built the 3D city next

Everything we’re working on is animated with programming, or scripted particle effects, combined with the user ability to upload a photo of whoever, and place it into the giant menacing monster to add some humor and a personal touch – all of which can be saved and sent to a friend.

Here you can upload a photo, rotate and resize, change your monster's name, and choose what monster you'd like

The further we get into this project the more complex ideas pop up, and the more we seem to learn. So besides the fact there’s nothing you can learn from blowing up cars with a laser beam, we’re now more proficient in database management, file saving and uploading, email integration, action script programming and file compression. On the creative end we also managed to design the entire city with Swift 3D – modeling and lighting our way to a miniature city look and feel that couldn’t be created in Flash alone.

Put them all together and you get some exciting results!

Sometimes it’s just nice to try something off topic and a little different. We’ll launch a working version in a week or so, until then.. I’ve got some rubble to draw.

It ends up, boys like to blow things up, build things, work with machines, while girls tend to stay away, but for what reason? The activity uses the idea that we can use design and engineering to help people (in this case senior citizens), not just give them something cool to look at.  In the end with the right product we can better their lives.

Edheads Engineering - Design a Cell Phone

Creating the activity was a short but rewarding process – we created a design application where users can build a near infinite number of different phone styles using our 100% script based phone builder. We had to put the breaks on certain aspects to fit the activity, but overall it’s a very intuitive and rewarding feature which has already been used 97,000 times in the first week since launch (based on our lesson tracking data).

Through the process we worked along side Ohio State, as well as Motorola engineers to create a situation where the user needs to not only research and design, but listen to consumer feedback in order to get the best sales results. If you ignore the research you won’t know what sort of phone to build, and chances of being successful go down quite a bit.

Interview the senior citizens

This is the first non linear activity we’ve built for Edheads, and it’s already proving its educational value based on user testing, critiques and overall response. For some additional information on the launch, check out The Ohio State Engineering news site for a little blurb on the project. Motorola also has a bit of info on their overall educational initiative used to help fund the project at their news site.

Engineering Sales Results

We have many more engineering project topics to explore, it’s just a matter of time and funding – next up starting late July we begin ‘Nanotech’ – something to do with fabrics, but that’s all I can say.

Flash is a little tricky when it comes to this sort of thing… choose a single wrong export setting when making your .flv file and you waste three hours figuring out what went wrong (I’m talking about 3 gig video files being compressed into 4 meg .flvs.. it takes a while!).  For instance, if you thought importing the video into the .FLA timeline sounded like a good idea, it may be but only if the file was less than 25 seconds long. After that the audio track either speeds up or slows down and the visuals of not only your flash animation, but the person talking in the video itself become out of sync.

So understanding the above, and that we should use .FLV (external flash movie files) and import them into our eLearning template, we thought we had it figured out. The odd thing was, was that the audio and video might be in sync, but the timing of the main timeline visuals was completely random. We’d test the file once, and everything (bullets, animations) would time up perfectly. Test it again, and suddenly only the first bullet was well timed, the rest was completely off, sometimes by as much as 5 seconds. It was random, things like deleting a single frame would throw everything off.. even clicking a key frame would shift everything around.. it was very buggy looking.

The way I see it, the video is on an independant timeline, and once I thought of it that way I assumed that the video was playing as fast as it could, and the flash timeline was playing as fast as it could, and every once in a while they’d sync up, which wasn’t good enough.

The solution was to glue the video to the timeline, while still keeping the .flv files external. The way we went about doing this was importing a silent 1 second audio clip, adding a layer, then set it to loop, and stream for the entirety of the video file and main timeline.

Just like the difference between event and stream sounds, the streaming sound basically embeds everything on the flash timeline down into a permanent visual/audio experience. It makes the file sizes a little larger, and degrades the quality just a bit, but in the end you get a flawless timing of and external video file and an internal timeline animation.

Users get to slice, probe, suture and stimulate the ailing patient back to health using actual (by actual I mean virtual) tools with gloved hands and spurting blood effects. We were particularly proud of the blood.

You may find some humor mixed in with over 40 minutes of pure educational interactivity, multiple character designs, numerous environments and some good special effects.

Within 5 hours of launching, and with no media exposure or marketing we have had over 13,000 individual users launch the activity – we keep track of each launch and section through our own back end counters. It’s pretty exciting to see word spread so quickly on a project you’ve poured your company’s efforts into.

So, enough words, go check it out for yourself:

Edheads Virtual Brain Surgery

You can also check out some screenshots in our portfolio.

This is a bit of back-story and a bit of an announcement that we’re beginning development on Deep Brain Stimulation surgery in about two weeks. What exactly is Deep Brain Stimulation you ask? Let me tell you a story!

It began on a pleasant Monday morning, around 6:45 am in Columbus, Ohio. I was at my business partner’s house getting ready to drive over to the Ohio State Medical Center to watch firsthand a DBS surgery, basically a bunch of surgeons sticking electrodes into someone’s brain to help cure the disease at hand. After some waiting around for the surgery to begin, we entered a large OR, with around 10+ surgeons, medical Reps, nurses, and technicians crammed in. Sitting in the center was a man who looked semi-conscious (moving or moaning something every now and then) waiting for a surgeon to drill some holes in his head. Before I knew what was happening, out came the staple gun, and they began to attach some sterile drapes to the guy’s head.

Watching someone who is conscious (not in pain, but conscious) get over 30+ staples shot into his head as he moaned apparently set something off in my subconscious, that this was the time and place to feel extremely nauseous. Slowly darkness crept in from the corners, my speech slurred and I remember feeling a nice cold sweat and reaching out towards someone in the room saying “I think I’m going to pass out”, which in reality probably sounded like “Mrrrmmm, unghh paaaasss” as I dropped to the floor.

Everyone around me was apparently prepared for this sort of situation, as i found that around 3 people had caught my cold clammy body and sat me down on a stool. It was quite an experience! I got walked out of the room and handed a coke to get some sugar in me, and after about 10 minutes of feeling like I was about to throw up I headed back into the OR to get some surgery on. 

Just a side note to reinforce what happened: men don’t faint; they pass out… it sounds cooler. 

Now, all refreshed and invigorated, I watched as a team of surgeons began to help a man with severe Parkinson’s disease by drilling into his skull. The patient was at the point where he had to take his medicine once every two hours just to function (things like walk, talk, eat, etc.). This surgery is generally reserved for very drastic cases with no other option as it’s fairly new, but nonetheless amazing.

Using an array of technology like 3d head scans, gps systems targeting little metal balls which were screwed into the patient’s head so they knew where they were probing, and some little radio dials and temporary pacemakers to help adjust and find the right settings to in effect turn off the advanced Parkinson’s disease.

I have to say, the realistically, this was a boring surgery to watch. It was around 4.5 hours long, and mostly consisted of turning dials, inserting thin metal rods into a brain, tweaking this, listening for the right sound to come out of the machine, and talking to the patient (who has to be awake during the surgery to make sure everything was going as planned). The amazing part was watching the before and after.

The surgeons would turn off the stimulation and have the patient draw circles or write his name on a piece of paper, which would look something like a jumbled scribble (think of a hand waving back and forth randomly trying to draw a straight line). Once the probes were in place, they’d have him test and re-test his writing and drawing abilities until they found the best setting (sort of like getting a new prescription for glasses, only with metal rods in your brain!). On the final test the man could write his name and draw a nice round circle, as if he had never had Parkinson’s. It was the biggest and most impressive change I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine how much it was going to change this guy’s life for the better.

Overall it was a pretty cool experience. How many eLearning developers get to stand 3 feet away from live surgeries, sometimes have a chunk of cartilage or piece of bone fly by your face and get to recreate it for the rest of the world to experience? Now the challenge is to take what we’ve seen, convert it into a script and begin illustrating, animating and programming the process into the next Edheads.org virtual surgery.

If you have the urge for other surgeries in the mean time check out www.edheads.org. 

Ahh, ‘tis the season for submitting work to awards. There’s no better way in my opinion to get some marketing done than to get a nomination. Winning is great, but being nominated is just as profitable in most cases seeing you end up with a link from a heavily trafficked site like the Webbys or Flash Forward.

What we’ve done is taken the trouble to find every award we can regarding eLearning and or interactive design, and have compiled a sort of loose calendar and listing of entry fees/deadlines, etc. I’m sure we’ll help the competition find these awards a little faster by showing them all here, but that’s the point of a contest, to have challengers! 

Here’s the list in no particular order (Note this is fairly rough, and lacking some info due to non informative award sites):

Webby Awards

• http://www.webbyawards.com/
• Entry Fees and DeadlinesWebsite/Mobile: $295
• Final Entry Deadline is December 19, 2008

Brandon Hall Awards

• http://www.brandon-hall.com/
• No deadline listed yet for 2009

SXSW

• http://sxsw.com/interactive/
• Deadline: December 01
• Fee – $25 per site/category

One Show Awards

• http://www.enteroneshow.org/
• Deadline:? 
• Was open in November 11^th 2008 for 2009
• Fee: $300

ADC Awards

• http://www.adcawards.org/register/
• Not sure on deadlines or price

The E-Learning Awards (London)

• Each entry costs £99
• http://www.elearningage.co.uk/AWARDS.ASPX
• Deadline is June 30, 2009

CODiE Awards

• Non-profit cost = $295
• Others = $595http://www.siia.net/ 
• Deadline: October 1st^th (prior to year of award)

Horizon Interactive Awards

• $45 entry fee
• http://www.horizoninteractiveawards.com/
• Deadline is Feb 20, 2009

Stevie Awards

• 190 entry fee before Dec 13, 2008
• $225 before April 1, 2009
• $260 after March 31, 2009
• http://www.stevieawards.com

Communication Arts Interactive Award

• Deadline: December 15, 2008
• http://www.commarts.com/competitions/interactive
• $100 per website

Flash Forward

• http://www.flashforwardconference.com/
• Deadline:? (Varies – sometimes happens 2x per year)
• Fee: Free!

MUSE awards

• http://www.mediaandtechnology.org/muse/index.html
• Dec 1 – Jan 31, 2009
• Entry fee:?
• (Need to be affiliated with a museum)

If you happen to know of any other awards regarding eLearning, training, interactive design, etc, please email us through our contact page and we’ll add it to the list. Thanks!

Upfront planning and design considerations can be intimidating to some. It is very difficult to design visuals when you don’t have content, and tough to set the mood for a story that might not exist yet.

The process of planning ahead for design and functionality changes down the road can be intimidating. First you’ll have to come to the realization that there is no way to predict the future. Who could have guessed that by 2010, all computer monitors would be set to 10,000 x 6,000 resolution, and that project you created in 2004 at 640 x 480 is now the size of a postage stamp? Some things just can’t be predicted. Your best bet would be to look one or two years ahead and take a guess, especially with projects you know will be used year after year.

Issues that arise from changes in storyboards, content or anything affecting your project can be infinite. What if in the middle of your 6 month long project you came to realize you needed audio controls, such as play, stop and volume. What would save you time and get the addition completed would be a sloppy hack job. This might take you less than a day to get up and running. You’d be doing this however, with the knowledge that any future projects based on this backend system you’re building will crumble the second any programmer but yourself touches the source files.

An alternative approach is to work within structured guidelines using reasonable timeline goals. This audio fix might now take 2 weeks to do it right as opposed to half a day. What a bummer! The truth is, when you do something wrong or sloppy, the problems you create may take a whole month to fix later on, as other aspects of the code become dependant on your sloppy code. It’s the house of cards effect, where you pull out one part of the structure that all other parts rely on, and the whole thing may come crashing down.

Seeing there’s no right way to plan far in advance, what you have to do is create some sort of constant update timeline. Checkpoints in development where you really focus on debugging code, making everything work together flawlessly, so that in the end you don’t have a hulking mess of jumbled up templates, actionscript files and graphics.

It always happens at the worst possible moment, doesn’t it? You’re booked solid, working 10 hour days, borderline zombie, and the program you use the most starts acting funny for no reason, and apparently no one else in the world has ever shared the same problems (or so Google tells me).

I’ve recently come across a host of Flash audio problems and feel I’ve come up with some fairly straight forward solutions. One side note just FYI is that all audio used was professionally recorded, so none of the issues from what I can tell were caused by the quality of the initial recording.

Problem #1: My audio file sounds slow and drawn out, like a dying record

While adding in .wav audio into a project, it took me a while to realize it, but the VO (Voice Over) actors all sounded a lot deeper voiced that I’d assumed was natural. A few hours into the project I needed to edit a clip of audio and opened it into my favorite editing tool, Adobe Audition (earlier known as Cool Edit Pro before being bought out). Lo and behold the VO actor’s voice sounded clear and natural, the way it should. So what was Flash doing to my file?

Solution #1: Batch process or save your files at a different sampling rate

Now this may be a no brainer for all you audio editing geniuses out there, but for a Flash developer like me who only dabbles in the complexities of professional audio recording, it took a while and some digging to figure this out.
To correct this problem, re-sample your files down to 44100 HZ or a lower quality 22050 HZ. Flash likes these two sampling rates the best which is the important part. You can do 44100 HZ, 16 bit Mono, or 44100 HZ, 32 bit Stereo, it’s the sample rate that matters and will fix the problem.

Problem #2: My audio file appears to randomly skip the first .75 to 1 second of audio in my file

This was a new one on me. I’ve had audio files cut out in the middle for no apparent reason, but to have a batch of 20 perfectly edited .mp3 files, and on import say 5 of them appear to skip the first second or so when playing back. Very odd! It didn’t matter if I put it on streaming, speech or event sound, and when I opened the audio file in Audition it played back perfectly fine.

Solution #2: Add some silence

Keep in mind this is a hack and doesn’t explain why Flash is acting up, nor does it really solve the problem, but it does work! After a few hours of frustration, I decided to add about .75 seconds of silence to the beginning of my skipping audio files. This was done in Adobe Audition, and I simply saved over the original file and kept the same file format and sampling rate. I then updated my file (or re-imported it) into Flash and there you go… problem solved. The file would no longer skip the first word.

Problem #3: My sound quality varies even though all my files are from the same recording session

I am, importing correctly sampled .mp3 audio files, when every once in a while, I’ll come across a random file that just sounds muffled and degraded for no apparent reason. I go back to Adobe Audition and check the source file, which always ends up being perfect and clear, but back in Flash it sounds like it was recorded on a Fisher Price microphone.

Solution #3: Tweak then re-save the file

I found the simplest way to fix this, was to open up the .mp3 in Adobe Audition, add the slightest bit of silence to the beginning of the audio file (like .1 seconds), then save over the original. I then updated or re-imported my audio file back into flash and amazingly, the audio quality is perfect and crisp.

Problem #4: My .FLA files are HUGE after importing my audio

Most people could care less about the size of their source .FLA files, but when you’re like me and make backups nightly, or have to zip and ftp source files around the globe, large file sizes are a huge pain.

Solution #4: Batch your .wav files into .mp3 files before importing

Unless you could care less about file size and set your sound export settings to RAW (uncompressed), you are most likely compressing your imported Flash audio to .mp3 format whether you know it or not. The trick to not only reducing your source file size, but also getting the best possible sound quality out of Flash is to set your sample rates and file types to exactly match your Flash audio export settings. Why? For one you can cut about 50% of your file size off .FLAs by using .mp3. And secondly, when you let Flash do the compressing for you, you might get some sketchy low quality results. By pre-sampling and compressing, you basically tell Flash to back off and not touch your audio files.

Problem #5: I like to mix Event sound and Streaming sound on various occasions, but the audio quality never sounds the same when using the two settings side by side

When you deal with a lot of VO audio, there are plenty of situations where you need both a mix of streaming sound and event sound.

To explain the difference, streaming sound is permanently glued to the timeline, and will play frame by frame when you scroll the scrub head through your .FLA file. If you need to time something precisely (like lip syncing, a music video, animations) this is the setting for you.

Event sound on the other hand, will play an entire audio file, even if the audio is sitting on a single key frame. This is great for sound effect triggers, button sounds, quiz responses, and any situation where you need to cram a lot of audio into a relatively short timeline.

The problem is, even if you set both export settings (there’s one for streaming, and one for event sounds) to the same sample rate, they both come out sounding entirely different.

It ends up that Event sounds are higher quality in nature than streaming sounds, so how do you blend the two together to get a seamless quality sound?

Solution #5: Set your streaming export to “MP3 80HZ – Quality Best”

Simple right? Just bump up (reduce) the compression. I don’t know why Event sound is so much more crisp… something to do with the file calling an instance from the library as opposed to permanently mapping the audio to the timeline (as in streaming). The “problem” is that I’d usually assume that 32HZ Streaming would result in the same quality sound as 32HZ Event, but not so.

Well, that does it. I’ve run out of audio problems. If anyone knows of any other Flash audio issues and would like me to take a look or add the solution to this post, shoot me an email!