Hello everyone, we are pleased to report the following progress that has been made; All chemicals and reagents have been ordered and received. This means that we are now in a position to replicate practical laboratory experiments in order to produce multimedia content. We are finalising the sequence and exact nature of the multimedia content to be implemented in DNA-Fc. The junior researcher and computer programmer on the project have met to discuss the practical nature of the learning material and how software can be developed to bring advanced interaction to specific areas of DNA-fc. An abstract is currently being prepared which will be submitted to the School of Education teaching and learning conference which takes place in May 2015.

Happy new year to you all! Over the Christmas break we have all been very busy identifying aspects of the DNA-Fc we can adopt to create a more user friendly interface. Following our meeting today we can confirm the following updates; the ethics form has been amended and will be submitted to the ethics committee in the near future. The learning content including the practical methods to be used has been explored in detail and the format of DNA-Fc is now beginning to take shape. Finally the biologists will provide a f2f demonstration of the practical learning so the computer scientist members of the team can better appreciate the nature of the practical content we are trying to transfer to the virtual space. We look forward to updating you with further developments. 

Hello everyone as promised here is a glimpse at some of the additional resources that will be generated through DNA-fc. This link will take you to a brief overview of plasmid recombination, inserting a vector, enjoy.

http://youtu.be/8rXizmLjegI

Hello everyone, we are very excited to present the first official progress post keeping you up to date with what is happening. After our meeting today we can confirm that the preliminary ethics proposal is almost complete, with just some minor adjustments to be made. Secondly there has been some progress in the time framework in which work will be carried out and lastly an exhaustive array of internet links have been organised, some of which will be embedded in our flipped content. An example of this will be added to the blog shortly.  

Appointment of Junior Researcher

Congratulations to Dave Young who has been appointed as the Junior Researcher on the DNA-fc project. He brings considerable experience in molecular biology and is a welcome addition to the team!

Developing animated video content with e-adventure

As we start the DNA-fc project and whilst recruitment is underway, I have been looking for suitable tools to help us create interactivity in our content. The first tool Tested is called e-adventure and is developed by the e-learning research group at University Complutense of Madrid.

http://e-adventure.e-ucm.es/

e-Adventure

This tool is essentially a games engine for 2D games, however the interface and user manual is designed for people who aren't familiar with developing games or even with programming. 

It also has  export functionality to SCORM. This is the main reason behind choosing e-adventure as the first tool to try out. SCORM is an e-learning standard which is supported by many Virtual Learning Environments, including Blackboard. Hence in principle the blackboard version at the University of Northampton, called NILE (Northampton Interactive Learning Environment) should be able to directly import the exported SCORM packages generated with the e-adventure tool. 

How easy is it to build something?

There are two different modes in which to create 'adventures', third person and first person. In third person mode, you are going to need a character and the user will watch from a distance and see the character move across the adventure. In first person mode, the user sees the adventure as if they were there themselves, and thus there is no character. I decided to go fir this mode as it saves creating a character and would allow me to make something quicker. The e-adventure website has a good user guide, and a very useful video. This video explains the basic concepts of chapters scenes, cut scenes and how you add clickable objects and exists to these. 

Going ahead I took a random image of a lab, a microscope and a corridor off the internet as well as an instruction video about using microscopes. I had to transform the video into a different file format (using a free online tool) as e-adventure is a little limited in terms of supported video formats. However after having done that it took about 10 minutes to create a simple adventure. In this adventure the user starts in a lab and can interact with a microscope or exit through the door to a corridor. In a stand alone mode it seems to work pretty well. 

Does it work?

You can download my first effort as a stand-alone game here. To run it you need to have java installed (almost everyone does these days). On most windows PCs you can simply double click on the jar file. It should also run on a mac, o a Linux machine and on some tablets or phones, though I haven't tried those.

What about inside the NILE Virtual Learning Environment (based on Blackboard)? Unfortunately so far my efforts have been less successful. While the import actually works quite well the package attempts to run the game as a java applet inside the NILE site. While applets were very popular until recently, recent security issues have lead to the introduction of several security features. One of those is the requirement for applets to be signed with a certificate identifying the author. Without having such a certificate I haven't been able to get pas the security warnings quite yet, although the e-adventure developers are quite supportive on their forum and there are still a few things left to try.

New positions advertised to work on DNA-fc project

We are now recruiting for two positions:

Junior researcher

https://www.unitemps.com/Search/JobDetails/3214

Computer programmer

https://www.unitemps.com/Search/JobDetails/3215