Hello to the Dhahran Ahliyya School

We are glad to have you with us! Enjoy exploring the wiki and getting your profiles set. We can not wait to see the great things you will do! Check back here periodically for updates and news. See you online.

Hi Everyone,

We are excited to share with you a demonstration of selected summer projects created by the SEED-School students and teachers. These projects were created over the summer (while many of you were on vacation). However, as you can see, some of the students and teachers came up with game ideas, videotaped paper prototypes, and Flash Animations.

Click and have fun, and enjoy the show!

* To browse the MySLife.org wiki, you Must login first! *

Share your thoughts by clicking on the "Comments" link on this Blog.

Samar's "Anti Green House Gases" game images:

Check out the Global Climate Science Animations created by the Schlumberger Volunteers during the month of Feb - May 2008.

Chongwei's Wave Energy Animation:

Login to the MySLife Community Wiki, and leave a comment about their great work!

See you on the Wiki!

Itay
p.s, If you are interested in catching up or continuing your projects on the MySLife.org -- please email me as soon as possible and let me know. Waiting to hear back from you all.

Last Day

My Summer Job with the World Wide Workshop Foundation is coming to an end. It’s a good time to reflect on some great things that happened on our MySLife Network since I joined the team a couple months ago.

The MySLife network certainly continues to thrive! This past month witnessed a lot of progress from MySLife participants. A lot of rather ambitious and elaborate game ideas have been posted and a few have been turned into storyboards and flash scenes.

In particular Samar, who was the first to post her game scenes in flash created a pretty interesting concept marrying scientific ideas on the Ozone layer and global warming with a fun and immersive game and an engaging narrative.





I truly enjoyed helping and contributing to the making of this innovative project, as we were trying to figure out how to connect people from all around the world around science learning and the climate crisis. I grew to realize the value of operating a global network for learning science. I was fascinated by the power of communicating, on a daily basis, with MySLife participants from Trinidad, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Russia as well as with colleagues in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and West Virginia. Online collaboration and learning using Wikis and Blogs is on the menu daily at the World Wide Workshop Foundation.

Moreover, I also learned a lot about the value of designing and programming social-issue games and simulations, and how to use Web 2.0 tools for learning.

I will miss interacting with MySlife participants and seeing their ides take shape into games and witnessing their steep learning of game designing and flash as today will be my last day at the WWWF.

I would like to thank the participants for the opportunity of learning with them and through them as well as the team here at the WWWF and all those who made this opportunity possible for me.

Keep up the good work everyone!. I will be checking-in and looking forward to hearing about everybody’s progress.

Learning Flash

Just like most of MySLife participants, I spent last week learning a few simple things about Flash(keyframes, motion tweens, layers, symbols, etc) and how to use the software to create game scenes and simple animations.

I spent the first couple of days self-learning, trial-and-error type of methodology and it was very time consuming. I also don't think it was such a great and productive idea after all :).

I then started watching and using the video clips prepared by Daniel, one of the WWWF summer interns and a few other from YouTube that were on the wiki:




Following these show-how type of tutorials made the learning much easier and much more fun so my advice is: use them!:)

Saudi Arabia, Trinidad, Malaysia and Russia onborad!

This past week students from Trinidad (St Benedict's College and Point Fortin Junior Secondary School), Saudi Arabia, Russia and Malaysia have started MySLife – Global Climate coursework with us.
It is very exciting for me to be communicating with people from different regions of the world while going myself through a similar learning experience.

The coursework is progressing smoothly. Maisam, Lojain and Samar from Saudi Arabia have already created their profile pages, reviewed previous games and animations and posted ideas for their own animation projects.

Lojain’s project is about alternative energy sources and more particularly solar energy and here is an extract from her project page at the MySLife wiki :

“Not many people know about using the solar power as an alternative energy, though it has been there since the 1970s. That is why I’ve chosen it to be the topic for the animation I’m illustrating. “

I look forward to following the course along the students and help them out with the process and content.

3 very useful Wiki Tips

I want to share with you 3 very useful Wiki tips to help your online learning experience at MySLife Wiki.

TIP 1) Examples Examples Examples– Share your work!

Reading, Watching and Downloading the code of someone else's work is a great way for collaborative learning!

All MySLife syllabus topic pages have a discussion tab (on the top menu) that has examples of other SLB participant's work.

• Animated Illustrations Topic examples
• Text Topic examples
• Graphics Topic examples

Visit these pages, download the code! Play and modify the work to learn how to make your own. Don't forget to add a copy of your work there too!

It's all about sharing!

TIP 2) Watch your pages for changes

Wiki has a useful tool to let you know when someone changed a Wiki page (wrote a comment, added an image…).

Use the watch tool to get an instant alert right to your mailbox when your pages are changed.

Here is how to watch a page:

1. login to the Wiki
2. Go to the page you want to watch (for example: Group Discussion Page)
3. Click "watch" on the top menu

Pages I recommend watching:

1. Main Page
2. Group Discussion Page
3. Itay's Talk page – where everyone asks me questions and gets answers : )
4. Your own Page
5. Your own project page

TIP 3) File Gallery

Looking for someone's work and can't find it? Uploaded a file but forgot its name? The File Gallery is the place for you!

The Wiki File Gallery has a list of ALL the files uploaded to the Wiki – Images, Flash Movies (.SWF), Flash Code (.FLA) and more.

The Wiki File Gallery is on the left navigation menu on the Wiki.

Let me know if you have any questions about the Wiki or MySLife Tutorials, I am here to help!

See you online!

Energy Solutions

Thinking about my Animated Illustration project related to Global Climate Change made me search the Internet and look for unique and interesting energy solutions. Here are three solutions I liked:

The most interesting one I found was “Wave Energy” – Turning ocean waves into energy sounds amazing.

Here is a clip about Wave energy:

Read more about wave energy at: www.alternative-energy-news.info

Another environment friendly energy solution I read about is “Garbage Gas” – Methane generated by rotting rubbish in landfill dumps could make a far greater contribution to the world's energy supply.

Here is how it works: (we can use Flash to animate it)

You can read more about at: www.newscientist.com

A another technology I read about is "Concentrated Solar Power - Power Tower" - Power Tower systems work by having a field of heilostats reflect solar radiation onto a central receiving tower. The heliostats are two-axles tracking mirrors that follow the sun over the course of the day, concentrating the solar radiation onto the tower.

Here is how it work: (we should animate this as well)

You can read more about at www.abengosolar.es

If you know of other interesting energy solutions, please share with everyone!