Admiral Starblaze from Dream Flight Adventures just posted an interesting article on Dream Flight's blog. Remember, Dream Flight Adventures is a simulator / curriculum company owned by long time Space Center enthusiast Gary Gardiner. The company has one simulator at Shaler Area Middle School with three more in development. Gary caught the Space Center bug as a young man when he attended several of our space camps in Pleasant Grove. Now that same experience Gary had as a boy is available to thousands of students in Pennsylvania through his Dream Flight Adventures.
Mr. W.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Courtesy of Richard Johnson’s Imagination Series
It’s been a bit quiet on the Dream Flight blog lately, which is a sure sign that we’re up to more than our usual shenanigans. We just got back from presenting at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, and we have several interesting new developments to report on in the near-ish future.
But for today, I want to take a moment to chat about something that isn’t exactly new but certainly is important and sometimes gets overlooked.
We like to make a big to-do whenever we unveil new missions (like Countdown andContaminant, our latest additions to our mission library). We talk about the premise, highlight the curriculum components, and give a sneak peak into a few of the main characters. Our missions are rich and elaborate stories, so it’s easy to get caught up in the details of their plots.
As a result, however, sometimes we gloss over the fact that each of our missions represents arich and fully interactive virtual world. Yes, our Flight Directors can take intrepid crews on adventures from the beginning, through the middle, and to the end of our stories… but they’re equally free to invent stories of their own—based on their own imaginations or even the actions of the kids!
This has always been the case, but lately we’ve made the creative process even easier for our Flight Directors by packaging up a collection of virtual world construction tools and putting them at their fingertips. We call them Creator’s Canvases, and they are completely open-ended versions of our virtual worlds that give educators powerful tools to create any learning adventure they want. The possibilities are endless!
The Imaginarium
sorry, im a bit confused, what is this "creator's canvas" thing? what does it do? is it a product that we can buy, or a mission, or what?
ReplyDeleteThey made it sound really cool, but I still am very confused on what IT actually is. can you please maybe talk a bit more about this in a later blog post?