Junior Detective Training Program

From January through to September 2004 I was involved, as a part of CACL Media - including Christopher Conte, Lee Wilson and Amanda Freke - in the devlopment of the Junior Detective Training Program.

The Junior Detective Training program is a CD-ROM based multimedia application for children between the ages of 8 and 11 diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. In order to enhance their emotional and social awareness, the children are presented with a number of scenerios that require the child to determine how the characters are feeling and the ways in which the scenarios relate to their own experiences.

The application was conceived and sponsored by Renae Beaumont, a PhD student of the School of Psychology, University of Queensland, as a research tool to gather information regarding the effectiveness of interactive media in teaching Asperger Syndrome sufferers.

Development

The development of the Junior Detective program began as the year-long multimedia project of the Livewire Media Production Team. At the completion of the 2003 teaching year Renae Beaumont sought out other developers to complete the project; from which CACL Media was created.

The Junior Detective program is a hybrid Macromedia Director/Flash application - the majority of content is written in Flash and inserted into the Director project to provide access to the user's hard-disk (such functionality is not provided by Flash for security reasons).

Personal Responsibilities

For the development of the Junior Detective Training Program I held the role of Lead Programmer. In this role I was responsible for the development of a number of items:

Developed the framework for communication between Flash and Director - including simple message passing, sending research data from Flash to be written to the harddrive by Director and sound cues and events
Worked on the framework to create the level 1 games - some aspects of this design permeated the rest of the application.
Completely re-wrote the previously existing sound system and animation control scripts - the new system is more cohesive and utilises an event-based triggering mechanism.
Updated the existing Minitests to conform to the new programming model and created the missing tests.
Created the Homework Journals and interative drawing program - featuring the ability to save user data and restore their comments and drawings at a later date.

Features

Example of a Level 2 review question

Full narration and voice support throughout the application.
Fully animated scenarios and stories.
Three unique levels covering
Level 1: Seven unique educational games to encourage awareness of other people's awarenesses.
Level 2: 20 animations following 4 characters through 5 different scenarios with multiple choice questions presented throughout.
Level 3: 3 multi-path animations that allow the user to choose the path the characters take.
Mid-level 'Minitest' progress reviews.
Text file logging of user actions and answers.
17 homework activities for children to complete, featuring an interactive drawing environment and print abilities - allows the child to express situations through a drawing and text explanation.
Sophisticated interaction between Flash and Macromedia assets.
Development of both Windows and Macinsotsh compatible executables.

Examples

Spot the Suspect Game Spot the Suspect Game: Feedback

Spot the Suspect Game with feeback
on the user's answer

Spot the Suspect

Spot tht Suspect is a game in the first level of the Program requiring the user to flip over cards that do not express the emotion displayed at the top of the screen

When all but three faces have been flipped, the user checks the answer and the program delivers targeted feedback for the current emotion.

Example Homework Drawing

Drawing

The Homework section, or Secret Agent Journals, presented the children with a number of questions and scenarios, the child was then able to provide with written or pictorial responses.

An updated example of the Drawing application found in the Homework Journal is available at the Interactive Drawing Canvas page.