Improving Tutorial

In this past week, I worked on the tutorial I used in the Science Center to improve it. I could demo it with one kid on the Saturday before (11/17) and I realized some changes to make such as the speed in some parts of the video.

The new challenge idea was pretty effective. I realized that the kid faced this experience differently than the others with the previous tutorial. In the most recent demo, after I helped him to choose the scenery, he took a time to think of what his story was going to be about before even holding the mouse! And his story was very cool, it had sequential sense and his actions were straightforward, while I noted in other kids that they were more interested in exploring different actions to see what it does than creating a nice story. This is also good, but sometimes they got lost for not having a story previously in mind.

Even not being his priority to explore the actions, he also could use new actions (different form the ones presented in the tutorial) such as walkTo and move(but Forward instead of Down). He also got how to add details very well, changing the properties of almost all his actions to match the speed and distances he wanted. He also could select characters in another way (by selecting from the dropdown menu under the preview).

In his last comments, he told something very interesting, that Looking Glass was a good program for movie making beginners.

So, after applying the changes I've got, I published a new version for the First Actions tutorial. To try to make it more exciting to the kids, I tried out to include soundtracks (from public domain) to fill up the gaps when the voice pauses and give some suspense sense.

I would like to know how the sounds affect your understanding: if it is nice to hear, it conflicts with the voice or it is bothering you.
So, please, check it out and leave a feedback!

https://vimeo.com/54333445

Soundtracks:

Chase Pulse Faster and Melodica Demo, by Kevin MacLeod