At £1,495 for a site licence, MissionMaker is outside many schools’ budgets. We have seen it used successfully with small groups of children of all ages and so want to bring it within even the tiniest school’s reach. At £295 a year, this should be possible.

Rather than buy a permanent site licence, we are offering you the chance to rent the software on an annual basis at less than 20% of the full cost. Not only does this give you chance to try the software at a reasonable price, it will also entitle you to free upgrades as they become available and significant discount on new datasets when they are released. We are currently working with the Institute of Education on a Shakespeare game-making set.

For an extra £100 per year, we can offer home access, by setting up downloads of the titles you have chosen for your pupils and staff to use at home.

If you are interested, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it OR ring 01865 331968 for a quotation.

We know school budgets are being squeezed, but we also know we have good tools for good teachers that make learning fun. The problem is how to make high-end game-based tools affordable ... at £250 per year, we think we have managed it.

What’s more, this offer allows you to build up your Kar2ouche library in manageable chunks ...

• The offer - £250 per year
• Year 1: Download Kar2ouche Composer and any other two titles of your choice.
• Year 2: Pay your £250 subscription, keep the three existing titles plus choose an additional title to download.
• Year 3: Pay the £250, keep your four titles and add another ... and so forth.

For an extra £100 per year, we can offer home access, by setting up downloads of the titles you have chosen for your pupils and staff to use at home.

If you are interested, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it OR ring 01865 331968 for a quotation.

According to many teachers and parents who’ve written to us, students just don’t want to stop working when using our software. We don’t think they should have to, so we want to make it affordable for home use. We have various options:

School Home Licences If you have the software in school you can pay £250 per platform for an annual home licence. This is ideal for promoting home-school links, supporting pupils’ independent work and providing teachers with copies for planning. We will set up the download; you just have to give staff and pupils the URL, username and password. £250 covers all the Kar2ouche titles you have, MissionMaker and MediaStage are separate platforms and so £250 each. (Those with Kar2ouche Builder or MissionMaker Rental pay just £100 per year)

Home Licences If you prefer, students can buy the software individually. We have found that parents really value the software particularly its ability to engage reluctant writers. If you own the software you can offer it to students/their parents at significant discounts. MissionMaker and MediaStage are £39.99 per year; Kar2ouche titles are £29 per year. Again we will set up downloads that can be turned off at the end of the period or extended without any hassle to you.

If you are interested, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it OR ring 01865 331968 for a quotation or order form to pass to parents.

What does it take for an innovative company to break into the mainstream, asks Sally McKeown

Immersive Education has reached the final shortlist of the Education Resource Awards (ERAs) 2012 in the category of Supplier of the Year with less than £1 million annual turnover.

Read the rest of the article...

Working with the London Knowledge Lab again, we have won a bid to scope a new version of MissionMaker that will allow users to create Shakespeare games. We’re really pleased that this is being supported by The Globe Theatre education department and Cambridge University Press. The scoping project runs throughout the summer term and then, if it’s successful, we’ll apply for full funding. This won’t only allow us to make a themed Shakespeare pack, but add other data sets and so extend MissionMaker to be more curriculum topic friendly. Watch this space.

Kar2ouche Improving Writing provides a wide range of backgrounds, characters, props and soundfiles that will enable you and your class to create storyboards, animations and publications. You can load your own digital images into Kar2ouche, so that your students can set their storyboards in familiar locations – or even scan and load their own drawings and use these as settings or illustrations. You can also load texts (or your students’ own written work) into the Text window of Kar2ouche and base your activity around these. Through the activities, students are also given the opportunity to communicate ideas through collaborative working, exchange of views and group presentations. The images provide stimuli, and the texts provide models for your students’ own writing. The differentiated activities provide focused tasks that enable all students to extend their writing skills, and the plenary sessions give them the opportunity to reflect critically on their own work and the work of others.

The activities in this pack have been structured around the purposes of the familiar writing triplets from the Framework for Teaching English: Years 7, 8 and 9. At the start of each one, you will find a list of suggestions for alternative activities that are particularly suited to each of the triplets and to working in Kar2ouche. The variations are almost limitless. Many of the activities in this pack include photocopiable sheets that can be used during the preparation or evaluation stages and do not require access to computers. In this way you can make best use of ICT availability.

Structure

The pack is divided into three main sections.

• Introduction: This comprises an overview of curriculum coverage and a brief introduction to Kar2ouche.
• Activities: Here you will find the teacher’s notes for each activity, along with a copy of the step-by-step instructions that the students will see in the Activity screen. The five activities (summarised below) show how Kar2ouche Improving Writing can be used with your students. However, they are only suggestions to get you started. Kar2ouche provides the tools so you can devise your own lessons to supplement or replace those provided.
  • Activity 1 Alien Visitors (Writing to Plan, Draft, Present) The students watch a short storyboard about two aliens travelling to Earth in order to find out about life there. They then open one of two differentiated storyboards and supply the answers to the aliens’ questions about this planet. They work through this storyboard a second time, rewriting these answers in more formal English before swapping storyboards with a partner. They use a peer assessment sheet to comment on their partner’s work and then return it to the student to make final amendments.
  • Activity 2 Writing with Style (Writing to Imagine, Explore, Entertain) The students consider various ways to catch a reader’s attention at the beginning of a story. They then plan their own story and look at ways of making their writing more vivid and precise. They return to their storyboard plan and improve it, before sharing their work with their peers and writing up the story.
  • Activity 3 Crime and Punishment (Writing to Inform, Explain, Describe) The students watch a short storyboard which shows a range of minor crimes being committed, and then take on the role of a magistrate to decide on appropriate punishments for each one.  They watch a storyboard which shows a confrontation between an elderly man and a schoolgirl, and then complete a storyboard in which the man complains about the situation to the head teacher, before the girl explains her side of the story. In the final section of the storyboard, the students take on the role of the head teacher and explain to the girl the punishment she will receive.
  • Activity 4 Animal Rights (Writing to Persuade, Argue, Advise) The students watch a storyboard of a TV debate on animal testing. After considering the persuasive techniques that the characters in this debate employed, they use the information and strategies from the programme to complete a storyboard in which they have to try to change someone’s opinion about this issue. The students help characters in a storyboard to express their thoughts in formal English and then write a letter expressing their own views to a medical or animal rights organisation. The activity culminates in a class debate on the issue of animal testing.
  • Activity 5 A New Development (Writing to Analyse, Review, Comment) In this activity students are asked to consider a supermarket’s proposal for a new edge-of-town store. They look at the local residents’ views and the way that objections may be ameliorated. They write a councillor’s balanced summary of the views and make recommendations to the planning committee.

If you’d like a 30-day trial contact us here

If you then buy a site licence for your school quote offer newsletter 1 and we’ll give you 15% discount plus the first year of home free.

Just like us on Facebook before the end of the Autumn term and say what you like about Immersive Education or our products and choose a free standalone Kar2ouche title of your choice. We’ll set up the download for you. It would also be great if you could forward this offer to a friend. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with your username on Facebook so that we can verify you, your school postcode if possible and the name of the title you would like to receive.

During the summer, and in conjunction with NASA, the Virginia Space Grant consortium ran a summer ‘Academy’ for students. During the week long course students used Krucible to understand the physics behind getting to Mars and back. They then used Krucible to present their plans to NASA scientists.

Each year the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (see vasts.spacegrant.org) run an online course for students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The students study STEM through modules designed with NASA and covering space technology. The best of the students are invited to a summer Academy based at NASA’s enigmatic and highly secure Langley Research Center (sic).

During the weeklong Academy students work in teams under the scrutiny of NASA scientists to plan a manned trip to Mars. As well as figuring out how to get them and their equipment there and back safely, they have to plan how to live and work there for a period along with what experiments to carry out.

The students used Krucible to understand the physics behind getting a vehicle from earth to Mars, looking at the equations of motion, how forces interact and the effects of varying gravitational fields. The open-ended nature of Krucible allowed students to vary the parameters involved and to experiment in the safety of a virtual laboratory. They could then use that information to plan the trip, safe in the knowledge that what they saw in the lab would be repeated in space.

The week culminates in the teams presenting their plans to a panel of NASA scientist who pull no punches when it comes to analysing their plans. With Krucible in their armoury they were ready for the task.

For more information...

If you’d like a 30-day trial of Krucible please contact us quoting this article. If you then buy a site licence for your school quote offer NASA Newsletter 2 and we’ll give you 15% discount plus the first year of home access free.

We’re still offering FREE home access for your staff, students and governors

If teachers don’t have access to the software loaded on school machines at home, it won’t be used so effectively.

We don’t need to tell you that planning, absorbs many hours outside school and therefore you need access to the tools available in school, at home! Students and parents also tell us they would like to continue their work using our platforms when the school day has finished. We therefore provide home access downloads. If you’d like to trial this service we will set up a year’s free home access for you on one of the titles you already own. Alternatively, we will give free home access with any title bought before the end of the school year. A great opportunity for you to get to grips with the software and to encourage students to work in their own time! This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

At the end of the year, if you like and have used the service, you can continue with a charge of £250 per year per platform. So if you have one or ten Kar2ouche titles it’s still only £250 per year for all of your students and staff.

This term I started teaching again; I feel it keeps me honest. I’m just doing two sessions a fortnight plus one lunchtime a week ... find out more

The year six groups I’m working with are involved in a games-making project using MissionMaker As part of this course we’re working on writing for different purposes and audiences. So far we have looked at persuasive language when writing a letter reviewing a game and more recently we’ve explored composing emails and questionnaires for a specific audience. In future weeks we will be writing project proposals, instructions, logs evaluating progress, a walkthrough for a gaming magazine, a web advert and text for packaging. All the lesson plans and associated sheets and games are being posted on a blog:
https://immersiveed.wordpress.com

These are updated regularly with a bit of refection on how the session went and what might be attempted in a different way in subsequent lessons. At the end of the project this will be written up as a teacher support pack and put with the other free materials on the downloads section of our website.
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