At the start of the year I decided to enter another game dev competition but this time with a more serious theme behind it. The Serious Games Showcase and Challenge Europe is a competition based around the learning and training through gameplay and so I started to put together an entry based around one of my hobbies, amateur radio.
The idea for the game was a simple one, you have to complete the puzzles in order to bring an old radio back online before transmitting your final message. I was also going to use this as an education tool to give some of my pupils an insight into the game development process. It was all built in Scratch as this would allow my pupils who have had little exposure to coding to still be involved. This game really works Scratch hard as I got it to track the ISS and lunar cycles in real time as part of the game.
After months of developing and involving my various classes in the testing and refining process, I put together a little prop to showcase it but also put together a little promotional show reel (above). It made the final!
Set up for the final started at the beginning of the week at an event in Bristol. I took my son along to help set up and to test that everything was working. He found a bit of a bug in one of the areas of the game that had never appeared before, so there was a bit of frantically patching ahead of the final assessment.
The grand prize was a trip to Orlando to attend the huge Serious Games event later in the year. That prize went to a really deserving game that trained dental assistants. I met some lovely people from the dev community as well as the awesome finalists from the UK, US and Germany. What I found most interesting was how people could also see the huge potential a project like my game could have in promoting creative coding within schools and I'm really looking forward to discussing these ideas further to see where they lead.
I had to also give a talk on the value of gamification and creative coding in schools, which allowed me to tell the story of how my game came to be and all my amazing pupils who were involved along the way. I did win one category through, the Student Choice award, something that I was extremely flattered to be awarded.
It has taken months of hard work, both sat at a computer screen and in the workshop but the community payphone hacking project is now complete. It's been a huge amount of fun, despite it being a steep learning curve in integrating with old technology but I now have a working model of a hacked payphone and it's a delight, if not a relief to finally get to this point. It still holds true to the main point detailed in previous posts but as the project has evolved so have the features it now offers. The main idea behind the #RecodeThePhone project still remains, to save the disappearing phone boxes by repurposing the payphones that reside within them, whilst offering free calls, mailbox facilities and access to helplines to the people who need them. Previous versions: The #RecodeThePhone operating system now offers the following options: Option 1 : Free phone calls for registered members Option 2 : Free mailboxes for registered members Option 3 : Help and support lines Option 4 :
Initially the original idea was to try and repurpose the old, abandoned telephone boxes that are peppered around the city of Salisbury, turning them into broadcasting booths for pirate radio. I even came up with a way to turn neighbouring telephone boxes into relay stations to boost the signal from the transmitting booth. The boxes I had my eye on to start with were the ones situated in the centre opposite Tescos. After seeing how other towns and cities are repurposing theirs (I've seen some converted into shops and phone repair places, as well as your usual defibrillator station and libraries) I soon learnt that BT run an 'Adopt a Kiosk' scheme but my idea doesn't qualify for obvious law-breaking reasons. Shame, the idea was rather a good one, I was even sent an Ad Space Hack Pack that opens up advertising holders and frames to help promote the project. Not one to give up on an idea, and to make the project more desirable in the eyes of the law, I studied and passed my
Today the boy started asking how radio stations work so we took apart an old in-car FM transmitter and built a little radio station setup around it, all housed in a box we built and painted. Flicking the big switch at the front and talking into the microphone will see Charlie broadcasting his shows around the house and garden. The idea is to have one of those ‘On Air’ lights (hence the big hole at the front) illuminate when there’s a show going on.
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