Just Keep Spinning

I wanted to make something very interactive, game-like, and fun, with an element of randomness, a bit like a fairground game, in the way you select a country. The plan is simple - get a virtual globe on a big touchscreen that you swipe to spin it round (as fast as possible!). Where it stops, nobody knows, but that will be the chosen country. This is a cross between a 'strongman' game and roulette, and I think will have a great combination of skill, anticipation and chance. In computing, we call this sort of thing User Interaction Design, or UI. It means making the way humans use computer programs as easy as possible, as there are often new and unfamiliar situations. I wanted to plan the UI at the beginning, to make it simple, fun, physical (the swiping), and maybe a tiny bit competitive. In computing we also talk about User Experience, or UX. This is about what people do in a website, and how it makes you feel - happy, annoyed, frustrated, satisfied, and so on. Wit...

This is a blog about a website I am building. It's aimed at children about 9 to 14 years old. I will post regularly as I design and build the site, to show something of the process, and if I get comments, I might include them in the final site. My first idea for this project was this: Imagine as kids came into primary school in the morning and were spending a few minutes chatting and sitting down, that you could play some music from a random country in the world. Children could listen, dance or ignore it, and then you could have a brief chat about the music, and where it came from, how it made them feel and so on.  Though I've spent some time in class, I'm not a teacher, so I don't know if this would work, but I thought that the principle was, a teacher could use something like this as a conversation-starter, and it could tie in loosely with pretty much all other subjects, if the 'music' aspect was expanded to include other aspects of that country, as...