Month: March 2014

#thursdayplays: Duolingo

Duolingo: Good exiting English learning platform – They have a Website and a mobile application.

Website
mobile app

Duolingo is a free app that allows language learners to access language materials and practice translation. With this app, learners can check and track their learning process. 

Pros:

  • interactive lesson with a variety of tasks
  • random quiz like translating, listening, and speaking.
  • strong element of gamification, designed to keep the user engaged.
  • Checks user’s progress as they go forward 
  • animation part is interesting and motivated for children.

Cons:

  • Sometimes, texts are hard to read.
  • Animation is pointless in some part and these animation makes interaction slow.

 

 

#thursdayplays: Sprite Something

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Sprite Something is a drawing, animation and tilemap application for pixel artists and game developers. Draw multiple frames individually, then quickly drag and drop frames into an animation, or use your frames to draw tilemaps for your game levels. Export your creations to PNG, animated GIF’s and CSV files (tilemaps).

Since I’m making a game for midterm project, I purchased this app ($4.99) and tried designing simple animated character. On each frames you can add sprite you draw and fix them by tapping screen with finger. Many tools for drawing serve you any choices to create your own character, and you can also play it on preview mode and check out how your character moves. This app is good for those who are interested in game design.

#thursdayplays: Red Bit Escape

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Red Bit Escape is an amazing skill game with a simple concept: avoid the blue squares for as long as possible by dragging your red square over the screen. As things get a lot more difficult than they sound as time goes by. Intense and fluorescent colours for a unique and endless game.
Escape the blue squares and make the Red Bit survive as long as possible!
Drag it around with your finger and avoid the blue enemies and the blue force field.
Also you can compare and share your score with other players and your friends with Google Play Games Leaderboard.

 

#thursdayplay: Boiling OSSAN Eggs!

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It is a game that you boil an egg to collective an ossan (an old man in Japanese). It only has 2 steps to play: boil an egg, pell off the shelf. There are different kinds of salt and eggs which will affect the result. Once you have 12 boiled ossan eggs, you will get a new pot. Each ossan egg has its own character setting, like a stabber office worker or a shy restaurant owner.
I like it because it is simply to play. I don’t need to spend a lot of time on it but it’s still fun.  This game is similar to Mushroom Garden App which came out few years ago. Also, it has nice graphic design. I think the only weak point is you have to understand Japanese.

#ThursdayPlays Tap Project – use your phone to help children who have no access to clean water

According to the organization,
”768 million people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion people live without proper sanitation.”

Before March 31, if you use your phone to visit

uniceftapproject.org

For every 10 minutes you don’t touch your phone, the sponsors and donors will make a donation to support the UNICEF Tap Project based on the time you went without your phone.
(10 minutes = one day of clean water for a child)

news article:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/27/if-you-put-down-your-smartphones-for-10-minutes-a-child-will-get-a-days-worth-of-clean-drinking-water/