I have this mental block sometimes… when I think of ‘corporate training’ I use one part of my brain, when I think of educational games for kids, I use another. It could be that I was partially lobotomized at birth (I’m kidding.. who would write such a horrible thing!) or it could be the odd but persistent weight of client expectations of how one type of project should look depending on the target audience.

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!

Edheads.org wins TechColumbus Innovation Award, Executive Director goes full time

On February 4^th, our partner company Edheads.org continued its streak of success by winning the TechColumbus award for Innovation in Non-Profit Service Delivery.  The award was a surprise to Gail Wheatley, Executive Director.  “TechColumbus is known as one of the top 10 innovation incubators in the country, so, while we were hopeful, we certainly didn’t think we had this one locked.  There was a lot of outstanding competition, including the number one science center in the country, COSI, and the number one library system in the country, the Columbus Metropolitan Library,” said Wheatley. 

 Edheads has previously won major national awards such as the Flash Forward Award for Best Educational Content, and the Communication Arts Interactive Design Competition.  Edheads also successfully competed against international competition to win the American Association of Museum’s Gold MUSE Award, in conjunction with COSI, for best science education project.

 Edheads develops online educational games and simulations to help K-12 students understand difficult concepts and explore careers.   Over 12 million people annually (and over 100 million total since 2000) use the free service to learn the role of surgeons, engineers, weather forecasters, or crash scene investigators.  In order to produce the activities, Edheads partners with many organizations, such as Cardinal Orthopedic and Mount Carmel East Hospital, the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Ohio State University Medical Center and OSU College of Engineering. Partnering organizations help research and test the activities to insure their accuracy.

 In addition to winning the TechColumbus Award, Wheatley will soon be leaving her long-time position as Director of Electronic Education at COSI and will be assuming a full time position with Edheads. “This is the best of all possible worlds for me, says Wheatley.  “I get paid to learn about other people’s careers in ways most people only dream about.  I go into operating rooms and witness brain surgery up close, or I can explore an engineering lab at OSU and find how they create nanoparticles.  Then I get to share all that knowledge with students across the country, hopefully interesting them in science, math, engineering and technology along the way.  And I can’t express how grateful I am that the idea has really taken off and that now I get to do this full time!”

To experience Edheads’ free online games, visit http://www.edheads.org/ to be a surgeon, weather forecaster, crash scene investigator, engineer, and more.

Finally, the sweet smell of victory! With long five hour days and relaxing nights, determined to meet our lack of goals and making it up as we went along, We’re proud to announce:

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!

After a bit of a summer slow down, things are beginning to pick up around here with some of the most exciting projects we’ve seen to date!

On our plate is a little bit of everything from an interactive autopsy (yes.. you’ll get to poke a cadaver), nano-fiber engineering, fire safety and workplace collaboration skills to name a few. If there’s one thing I love about this sort of business, it’s that every new job is so entirely different from the last one – there’s rarely time to get tired of a topic.

As far as time lines are concerned, I have no idea, but everything is in the works. Hopefully by late this year/early next some of these projects will be available online to share.

Has anyone ever told you a skill was worthless, or you’d never need to do that, so why bother?  Well, for the last few weeks we’ve been doing a rather daunting project on the side, all for the sake of pushing our limits and learning new things. When I stand back and look at the results so far, I’m wondering how it relates to this company, our portfolio or anything having to do with training… the short answer is.. it doesn’t.  But, there’s always a bright site to digression – sometimes you stumble upon things you never knew were possible simply because you became curious.

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.

Earlier this week we wrapped up and launched Edheads Design a Cell Phone activity at www.edheads.org. With the help of Motorola, as well as the Ohio State University College of Engineering we approached the idea of getting girls interested in Engineering careers.

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.

All joking aside, we’ve spent some time redoing our entire portfolio of eLearning, training and educational game samples to show a bigger variety of our work in a more enticing format.

Great creativity and design sells itself, and we excited to show off a set of clear categories, larger visuals to ogle, and many more projects to view.

Be sure to check out the new character design, 3D and illustration sections as well! Although not commonly found services within an eLearning development company, these services are a great addition to any simulation or game and help smack your users in the face with entertaining visuals!

We just wrapped up a rather large project for an unnamed client involving about 16 one to four minute videos of the client speaking about a process. Our task was to import and compress the videos on an alpha channel, then time them to animated reveals, drawings and bullet points over time – and it needed to be exact.

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.

Well, after 3 months of hard labor we let our baby go off into the world today. Edheads.org has officially launched virtual Deep Brain Stimulation surgery.

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.

We’ve made the leap! From obscurity with Living Children to our bright new clarified future as Clearly Trained. It was a long time coming, but as you can imagine, when you have 10 years invested in a name hower bad or good, it’s a daunting task to change everything over, not to mention search rankings on the old site, business cards, new email addresses, etc. In the end I can honestly say I’m happy it happened.

Spurred on by business copywriter Dan Furman, who stated something along the lines of “Your name doesn’t make any sense”, we started our transitional efforts to launch this new brand and site in early 2009.

It’s our intention that the new branding help us focus in our current and potential client base to what we do best: corporate eLearning and Flash development.

If you have any questions on this transition please let me know, and fyi it will in no way cause any issues with current and past contracts, invoices or SOWs, as the parent company name is still Living Children, LLC.

So go! Explore! Check out the new site and I dare you to imagine the possibilities (it might just make your head explode!).