Make Your Own Activities Userguide

Introduction

This is a guide to how you create and save your own versions of activities on Spark Island Online. Although all the activities are different, the overall process of creating and saving a version is consistent throughout. In this user guide, Magic measuring is used as an example throughout. For more detail all the activities, which can be edited, look at the teaching suggestions for each activity.

From the link to 'Make your own activities' on your school home page, you will see the main 'Make your own activity' page which lists all the activities on the site, with descriptions, that can be customised and adapted by the player.



Clicking on a link to a specific activity will take you to a page where you can create your own versions and save them under your school account or under the teacher name.

Having clicked on the link for Magic measuring: Level 1, a specific page for that activity is displayed (see below). There is a detailed description of what this activity involves and what you can change if you create your own version.

You can create and save a new version in two different ways: a) Create and save an activity to your school account so that everyone in the school can access the activity later and edit it. b) Save an activity to your personal teacher folder on the site so that only you can edit it.



When you click on the link to create a new version of the activity, it will open the activity. You can play the default version of the activity from here immediately but you can also edit it or open other saved versions from here. The icons on the left hand side show you what you can do.

Play: When you have created a version in the edit screen, you can click PLAY immediately to play your version.

Edit: This is what you click on to open the edit screen so that you can create your own version.

Open: You can open other saved versions from here at any point during the game.

Save: You need to click save when you have created a version so that you can play it another time.

Clicking EDIT opens a separate screen. The one below is the screen for Magic measuring. What you see already on this screen is the information that makes up the default activity version for Magic measuring level 1. The three potions listed at the bottom display at random if you play the activity. You can edit these potions by clicking edit or you can delete them altogether to start your version from scratch.
When you are creating a potion from scratch, you need to work through the following steps:

1. Give your potion a title.
You can type in to the boxes at the top anything you like so that the potion says, for example, 'How to turn a pencil into a pancake'. You can also choose any of the items already listed in the drop down boxes.

2. Add ingredients to your potion.
Click on 'add new ingredient', type in what you want your ingredient to be and choose whether you want it to be measured in weight, length or volume. You need to add at least 5 ingredients in a potion. You can add more than 5 if you wish. This will mean that when you play your activity, the program will choose 5 ingredients at random from your list.

3. Add potion to the list.
When you are happy with your potion, click 'Add potion' to add it to the list below. You can always edit it or delete it later.

NOTE: If you want your activity version to only include your potions, delete the existing ones from the list.

Now you have created your activity version you can choose to play it directly by clicking PLAY or you can save it for use later.



Saving your activity version

When you click the save icon, a save dialogue box is displayed. You will need to give your activity version a file name and a description and then click save.



Once you have saved your activity version, you will be able to see it listed on your school page or in your teacher's folder - depending on where you chose to create and save it.

Go to 'Your school activity versions' from the school home page and make sure you refresh the page. To do this, hit 'ctrl' on the keyboard and click 'refresh' in your browser. You will now see your version listed below the activity title.

From the page 'Our school's activities', you can only directly play the new activity versions. If you want to edit them further click on 'Create and manage your versions' on the right hand side.

From this page you can:
1. create new versions
2. edit existing versions
3. edit the activity title or description
4. delete the activity version.

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