The problem with a start-up is you don’t have defined tasks, defined hours, defined anything really. For the past three days, I have been working on every single page of Spirit Lake: The Game, trying to improve every piece of the game, large and small.
I added in the multiplication dog on the “Extras” page where students can do extra credit tasks.
I made a little applet where students can walk Tasina, the main character, around the bushes to calculate the perimeter. This matches up with the Smarter Balanced test items that have students use a model to solve a problem.
For about a couple hundred pages of movies, stories, quizzes and other resources, I applied a style sheet so that there is a leather background, the text is indented 10-15 pixels to give it some white space.
I think I caught every page where a student would have to scroll down and instead broke it into two pages.
I added “read it to me” options to 20 more pages.
So, now it is being built. Tomorrow, our game testers are hard at it while I cross my fingers and hope that there is no conflict between the Coherent UI GUI we use and the style sheets. You think there wouldn’t be but I have learned never to take anything for granted.
Fingers crossed, come Monday, we will be shipping the new game out on flash drives to dozens of schools and libraries, sending a link out to all of our Kickstarter backers, subscribers and purchasers.
We need to get our fractions game, Fish Lake, out on the market. Sam and Maria are working on our first iPad game.
We’re now at Spirit Lake: The Game version 4.0 .
Here is the crazy thing – as excited as I am to roll out the new version and show all of the changes, I still have more improvements that I want to make, lots more.
For now, though, while our merry band of testers do their work, I am going to go do CEO things – read the business plan Maria wrote for a potential investor, review all of the work people have been sending me to review.
I know the answer to my question. I will never be done. I wouldn’t have it any other way.