The following are three related articles from The Micro User published in 1990. The first two are from me and the third, for reasons which will become plain, from Mike Gouda. The are an account of an e-mail based adventure that took place early in the year. Everyone got a huge amount out of it and, dispite the Notional Curriculum, I'd advise any teacher to have a go.
Bradwell Village School meets an alien
Marshal Anderson reports on a close encounter of the educational kind
The adventure began when some of our fourth years - middle school - logged on to our electronic mail service. To be honest, we had made very little use of it over the past two years and kept it going basically because Sherston Software had put some money towards it.
These particular children were having their first taste of electronic mail and were writing a letter to Sherston to thank them for their help.
To everyone’s surprise there was a message in the mail box waiting for us. My first assumption was that it would be one of those dull county circulars that we get from time to time that actually concern secondary schools, we still being among the few primaries with Email in the county.
After sending our letter it seemed a good opportunity to show the children how to download the message on to disc so it could be read later - watching the phone bill, you see. None of us expected this:
Help! Who are you? What year is this? Is there anybody there who can help us? There are two of us here, Jason DeVere and Emelda Grant. We do not know what has happened. We seem to be Lost. Is there anybody who can receive this message, please answer. Who are you? Where are you? What year is this? God save the King!
There seemed no reason not to respond so they went ahead. Their message was short. The children introduced themselves as Mrs Kennington’s class and informed the senders of the year that we have a queen these days. The message that came back caused quite a stir. Jason and Emelda, erroneously addressing their letter to Mistress Kenningtons-Class, claimed to be from Evesham - which tallied with their mailbox heading - in A.D. 1649 - which didn’t.
They seemed to have little idea about where or indeed who they were, except that it had something to do with Zorg and that things were definitely not as they should be. What they needed were some terms of reference to get their memories back, and could Mrs Kenningtons-Class help by telling them the sort of clothes they would be wearing?
Jan Kennington, their class teacher, was quite happy to make this part of the class work and so off they went to the school library. Jason, apparently, would be dressed in ruffs and plumes and Emelda in ringlets and frilly dresses.
Jason thought this fine, but Emelda was disgusted at such opulence.
They also filled us in a little about how things had started: it seems that Zorg had instructed them separately to go to the churchyard in Emberly Castle. Here they met for the first time where they had touched the gnomon on the sundial.
We soon got the answers when a message arrived from Zorg. An important, powerful creature speaking exclusively in capitals.
He/she/it informed us that Jason and Emelda were bringing an article of great power but, as both had touched it at once, the transporter calculations were upset. Co-ordinates were being calculated to bring them the extra 300 years to Zorg’s time and we were to leave them alone.
The next message from Jason and Emelda seemed very urgent. They asked us not to believe Zorg and enclosed a host of questions about their 1 7th century lives.
While filling in a lot of background knowledge, the class also managed to sort out, using maps and guide books, that the church they had vanished from was probably St Mary’s. At the same time they worked out that Jason was a royalist, Emelda a puritan - hence their different reactions to the clothes. Our children also pointed out that they were a group not a hyphenated Kennington.
However, to hedge their bets they also wrote to Zorg to find out what the object was and just what would befall who if they continued to help the lost pair.
Paranoia set in about now as Jason and Emelda, concerned that Zorg was intercepting their messages, started to encode many of them as well as being extremely cryptic about the solutions to the codes. As an added measure they suggested we use a password which locked the messages against prying eyes. The password was also hidden in a riddle.
Zorg now tried a different tack - Jason and Emelda were just silly children playing a joke, we were to ignore them and run along and play.
This caused quite a cavalier reaction from the fourth year of Bradwell Village. Our buildings insurance didn’t quite cover us for Acts of Zorg, but they wouldn’t listen. Pin-pointing Jason and Emelda’s disappearance then became the task. Having found the place the time was narrowed down by the fact that Charles was still alive when they left. After that they went on to identifying Jason and Emelda’s parents' names from clues they could remember.
By now theories were developing about how this had all come about. Zorg was seen as bluffing, no one believing in his powers. But how had the children been transported?
The explanation our fourth year came up with was that in that geographical area there had been several important battles and events that changed history. Somehow, these events were so strong that they had caused a vortex or time warp, trapping the children or allowing Zorg to kidnap them.
Meanwhile things were speeding up. Having found out that Jason’s mother’s name was the same as the King’s wife’s the search was on for Emelda’s father’s name. This stretched our school reference library to its limit and no one could find out who had written New Atlantis. On top of that, Zorg had changed tack again. Now he was demonstrating his power by coming up with some obscure personal details about the children in the class.
At a loss to know how Zorg could know this, they became more determined rather than worried. By this time Jason had enough of his memory back to return home but Emelda still had a problem. Zorg seemed to be involved in this and they needed to cut his power finally.
They discovered that transmitting Zorg’s first name would give them the break they needed and this arrived heavily coded. The code was cracked and the final message sent:
Dear Zorg, or should we say AMNESIA! ! ! ! HA-HA! Thought you could beat us eh? Well eat this! Jason and Emelda are home!! We think you've lost your mind so we're sending over a sledge hammer to knock it back in!!! WOOF! Sorry Zorgie Baby, but we've won and you've lost! Lots of love (shove off) PauL, Tim, Liam and everyone else in Mrs Kennington's class.
And we never heard from any of them again.
The children experienced a warm glow of satisfaction - while in the staff room we wondered at the chain of events that had a group of 12-year-olds burying themselves in history books for half a term.
Suspending Disbelief
Marshal Anderson reveals the secrets of on-line adventures and shows how to create them.
As more and more schools subscribe to some sort of electronic mailing system, and even more consider the idea, they are constantly on the lookout for some use beyond contacting pen-pals in Australia and ordering cases of wine. Being part of an on-line adventure can open up new horizons for you and your students.
The idea of the on-line adventure has been around for some time and has associations with the original adventure, in as much as problems are presented as text on a screen. But instead of the author generating problems to be solved and then preserving them in a fixed program, each step is written after seeing the player’s response.
Thus while the author might have a fairly fixed idea that the players should talk to a character they come across, if they insist on attacking it the whole course of the game can be altered on the hoof. Naturally this presents a potentially exciting field for players and a very creative one for authors.
In the early stages it was an interesting experiment set up by those enthusiastic enough to find the time to carry it out and, given the creative aspect, is it not surprising to find that Mike Matson - of 4Formation - was involved in the genesis of this form in a project set up with the Anthony Bek Primary School in Derbyshire.
This was not an adventure in the traditional problem-solving sense - Mr Matson took on the part of Yllawyllis, an alien orbiting the Earth asking for information about our planet. This led to some fairly heavy issues being discussed - the inequality of wealth in the world, wars and so on along with deceptively simple requests for information such as What is a dog? The important discovery was that this exercise, in essence the same old write-a-letter-to-an-alien task set for children at many levels, took on a whole new level of importance in pupil’s eyes because of the nature of the linkage and the two-way conversation.
Not only did this give rise to considerable enthusiasm among the children, it soon became clear that those on the receiving end of this kind of activity are able to suspend disbelief totally and thus give the project a level of meaning often difficult to achieve in school.
More recently Derbyshire have put a great deal of effort and not a small amount of cash into continuing the development of on-line adventures. It soon became clear that having an adult as the authoring end was nice but, apart from being impractical for most schools, it was also wasting half the opportunity presented.
With this in mind, projects were set up in which the pupils of a secondary school create the adventure for use by those in the primary school. Our own experience with Jason and Emelda trapped in time, described in last month’s article, began with contact from Evesham High School during the summer.
The proposal was that the two characters from the 17th century would be trapped in some never quite defined place by a never quite identified Time Lord from whom they could only escape by regaining specific memories of their own time. This situation was totally accepted by the 12-year-olds involved and the research generated was of a level few other kinds of project could have achieved.
This was using the form at a very simple level, a kind of question/answer format with a few coded messages thrown in. However, the whole thing can be taken a great deal further. The first part of setting up this activity lies in making contact with your partner school. There may be a temptation to try and link with one some distance away, but although this is an attractive use of Email, it throws up many practical problems for the staff involved in keeping in touch. Obviously you won’t want to use Email for teacher to teacher messages. Even if you use a password to protect the text, the constant arrival of protected messages from the same source as the adventure is bound to arouse suspicion in the children.
Having linked up with a school both parties need to agree on the adventure’s content. This will call for a certain amount of creative juggling of the lesson/project content in both schools. For example, you might wish to use the adventure to set up science investigations at the primary end, and these will need to fit in, to some extent at least, with the areas the secondary pupils are considering. This is going to be a more and more important consideration as the national curriculum takes hold, but whatever subject area or areas are chosen, both groups will be fulfilling several attainment targets in terms of language and IT.
A very easy way around this problem in a secondary school is to make this a club based activity in the first instance. After the first adventure you should have a measure of the possibilities and be able to integrate things more comfortably.
Having organised the groups at both ends, the adventure-writers have to come up with a basic plot. Here they can use many sources - children’s fiction, existing adventures, especially those early ones by Scott Adams, books of maths investigations or whatever subject area is being tackled, there will be a huge list.
One area of great importance is the environment in which the adventure is set; this must be consistent and believable. If you are dealing with a definite historical period your references will be obvious, but if you are moving into the future or some kind of fantasy there can be problems. One option is to use a fantasy period already created, Greek mythology is one, but don’t discount the wealth of material provided by role-playing games. These have come a long way since the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons and you will be staggered by the range of environments detailed in the source books this hobby provides.
Having chosen the environment and sorted out the problems the adventurers will face in some sort of loose plot, it is best to begin a few contingency plans right away. You know where the adventure should end and roughly how the team will get there, but what are the most likely deviations? It is a matter of personal taste, I admit, but there can be a feeling of claustrophobia if the plot is too trammelled, if the reply is too often: "Never mind about that, it’s not important." If they want to explore the air ducts, let them, it’s not your fault they’re occupied by child-eating trolls.
You will also need to decide who the members of your party are, how they got into this mess, and how they are going to communicate with the target school. The first tends to be a stock group. Create archetypes using The Famous Five or whoever, it does seem gangs offer most scope for plot development and can be used to explore human behaviour in a fairly meaningful way - though beware of stereotyping.
The second point may be that initially the group are in no danger at all, just calling in for a chat - then disaster befalls them. Again, the first call can be a cry for help. As to just how the contact is made, you can probably ignore this: "Jimmy’s got a portable micro," or "We’re transmitting on a hyperspace frequency" or, as in the example of Jason and Emelda, "We don’t know." Once the thing is under way it’s a question the children stop asking.
For the adventure writers the range of writing skills used is wide. Not only have they to produce work that is accurate and clear, they will also need to write in the voices of several characters. Narrative skills are then overlaid on that to develop a story in such a way that the very real audience never stop believing.
Once started, things can go anywhere, you may abandon your plot altogether, you may find that there is too much to get through and that you cut bits out and shorten the task, you should at all times be sensitive to the needs of the children at the receiving end. Most important is not to let them get bored or frustrated but never answer all their questions.
Keep a sense of mystery up to and beyond the end, let them want to know what happened after it all ended, leave the bad guys uncaptured if defeated - leave them wanting just that little bit more.
Lost in Time
Michael Gouda reveals how an Email adventure came into being
In the May issue of The Micro User Marshal Anderson described how Bradwell Village School met the mysterious Zorg and rescued two 17th century children from his evil clutches via an electronic mail service.
Although I must own up to being the author of this adventure game, the other end of the story was run by some fifth year pupils of Evesham High School who, with a little help, worked out the story and kept the adventure going for a term.
I became interested in the project after reading about some work done in Derbyshire with live adventuring. Here a school had co-opted an established author to plan out a story and be on hand to keep it going whatever replies were received from the correspondents. What Derbyshire could do, surely Hereford and Worcestershire could emulate? And over the summer holidays a friend and I worked out a rough draft of a history involving two children, Jason and Emelda, lost in time and suffering from amnesia. Only historical research about their roots would return them home.
It was not necessary to work out all the details at the start as these would depend on the reactions of the target school. Ideally the plot should have been invented by the pupils, but there wasn’t enough time, as I wanted to start at the beginning of term.
The Campus 2000 electronic mail network provides an index of all the schools which belong to the system divided into counties and it is interesting to see, by virtue of the number of middle schools, how generous some education authorities are: Hampshire has 103 primary and middle schools subscribing, but others have none.
I chose 10 schools with a pin and three replied, of which Bradwell Village was by far the most enthusiastic. The first message asking for help was sent and lay in wait for any unsuspecting pupils to find.
Meanwhile my group of fifth years - who were doing an Information Technology GCSE course and English - awaited the outcome. We planned that the tasks should work from the individuals outwards. First there would be easy questions which could be answered merely from picture books: For example, what are the children wearing? Emelda’s reaction to wearing ruffs was a hint about the Roundhead/Cavalier conflict that the Bradwell pupils soon discovered.
Then we asked them about a wider social area -17th century food, travel, medicine, entertainment, and that got them really researching with a vast quantity of information gleaned from their library.
Eventually we asked about various notables of the time and got them to find out about the political/religious situation which led to the execution of Charles I in 1649which, by sheer coincidence, happened to be the year the children had come from.
Although this sounds rather dry and academic, as soon as the pupils became interested in Jason and Emelda’s fate they were only too willing to provide as much information as they could in the hope that it would rehabilitate them and take them back to their own time.
They found out about Inigo Jones, William Harvey, Hooke, Boyle and Napier though they failed to discover the name of Francis Bacon, the Lord Chancellor and the author of New Atlantis - whom Jason’s father had supposedly been named after.
Added to this was the character of Zorg - who, incidentally, was not an alien, but a technologically advanced human from the 23rd century who stepped in occasionally to forbid the children doing further research - and so guaranteed to do the opposite!
We had some difficulty making him credible, though a little inside information allowed him to reveal some interesting facts from his database about his chief sceptics.
A primary target, naturally, was the ability to use an electronic mail system. Until this escapade we’d only had some desultory and trivial conversations which hardly justified the enormous subscription costs of Campus 2000.
There was a social value, we thought, in linking a middle school to a secondary even if the former never really knew who they were talking to. one of the things I was determined to avoid was any tendency to talk down to the juniors.
My authors had to keep in character, as Jason and Emelda were the chronological contemporaries of the Bradwell pupils. Of course they could go to town with Zorg, who on occasions got downright nasty.
The research element was very important on both sides, and if we did it again we might structure it a little better. The middle school pupils found out a vast amount of disparate information which could, perhaps, have been more valuable if better organised. However what really did come over was the genuine desire to help two people in trouble.
At the Evesham end the pupils had to draw on literary skills they had probably never used before. Although the general plot skeleton was there, the answers from Bradwell were hardly ever the expected ones and the lively imaginations of these 12-year-olds tested our brains to the full. The experience was a valuable one as regards IT where all pupils explored the Email system using word processing and passwords, plus creating and solving coded messages. I also thought it successful in the pupils having to think about fictional character formation and the way this is expressed in language.
I encouraged very formal language structure for the two 17th century children though they differed a great deal in outlook, while Zorg enthusiastically indulged in some of the worst excesses of the stereotyped teacher - at the same time remembering that he did come from three centuries into the future.
The final defeat of Zorg was met with great rejoicing from the Buckinghamshire end, and Jason and Emelda were whisked back to their own time.
From the replies it was obvious that some of the middle school pupils took these messages from the time travellers with considerably more than a pinch of salt, but there must have been some who, if not actually believing in Jason and Emelda, wanted to.