Gareth Jones

Quak Wordsearch is an application that allows you to play a different wordsearch game every time you view it. Whenever you load the game it selects at random from a list of words that you have specified and places these words on the grid in random locations.

When specifying a list of words for the game to use, you can also specify the title and grid size for that list.

The application also allows end-users to create their own games by clicking on the Make your own button and filling in the three fields for title, grid size and words list. A new game will be generated at random with those parameters.

Once a game has been created, it can be played either online or it can be printed out and played in the traditional way with a pen and paper.

Click here to use the wordsearch.

Want this game on your website for free? Follow these 3 simple steps:

1. Post a comment below.
2. Send me a message saying you’d like the game on your website – and remember to include a link to your site!
3. If your site meets the requirements I will email the game to the email address you used in step 2 – so make sure you use a valid address!

Since April 2010 I have been working full-time on Learnalot, a high-end game-based learning maths portal. I have so far developed the website itself, 18 activities and 34 games, which is around 18-20 hours of learning content. My responsibilities include coding all of the activities and games, managing a team of six, designing the activities with the content specialists and liaising with the PR company.

The development work has consisted of Flash, PHP, MySQL, XML, HTML and CSS.

I have also set up and maintained the Learnalot blog which provides behind-the-scenes news from the company.

The resources are designed to develop thinking, reasoning and problem-solving skills by presenting the learner with real-life challenges that engage their thought processes in new ways, using topics that students can relate to in their day-to-day lives in the 21st Century in a style that they are used to from their video games.

Feedback on the portal so far includes the following:

Your resources are excellent – the best skills-based learning resources for maths I’ve seen.
- Melanie Blount, NGfL-Cymru

The look of the site has immediately caught the interest of pupils who I know love to spend time on X-Box/PlayStation at home. Harnessing an existing interest for a learning purpose is probably the Mecca of education. I would love to know if you might have plans for a KS2 version at some stage?
- Steph Ladbrooke, teacher

Great website for revision especially for me and I’m in year 11. Amazing website!
- Alex, student

Amazing for me – I like a good challenge. My favourite resource is Britain’s Got Power because it gets you thinking about science and the environment.
- Ben, student

It’s really good because the score boards show you how you’re doing against your friends and other people. It’s another way for preparing us for our SATs. Cops and Robbers is my favourite because I feel like a detective.
- James, student

The Name that Note:PRE game that I developed for Jamplay was significantly different to the original game. The graphics were completely overhauled and the game-play mechanics modified to create a game that does away with the 60-second timer and instead ramps up the difficulty as the player progresses through levels that are each made up of 8 questions. As the player progresses through these levels, the time available for each level decreases until eventually they’ll need lightning-fast reaction speeds to progress any further.

The questions themselves are selected from a bank that is defined in an external XML file, as are some other game variables like the selection of base notes, the starting level time and the level time decay rate.

At the end of the game the user’s score is posted to the Jamplay score board via a Javascript API that they kindly supplied me with, and the top 3 scores are displayed on the gaming section of the site for all to see.

Yummy Drops was commissioned by Nourish Interactive.

It’s a modified version of Santa’s Parcel Drop with customisable messages that encourage healthy eating and an active lifestyle, as well as the food pyramid that features prominently on the Nourish Interactive website.

The average age of the target audience for this game is 4-10.

Santa’s Parcel Drop is a game that has you taking control of Santa, delivering as many parcels as you can within the time limit.

His reindeer are quite angry with being replaced by an aeroplane so are out to get him, so be sure to avoid them as well as the storm-clouds.

Gain 50 points for every successful drop and lose 25 points for every miss!

Active Goal Challenge was commissioned by Nourish Interactive.

It’s a modified version of Conversion Challenge with customisable messages that encourage healthy eating and an active lifestyle. Because the target audience for this game is aged 4-10, the game-play has been simplified with the wind property removed, and the leader board no longer requires an email address for entry.

The game was developed in both English and Spanish.

Name that Note: Pitch Recognition Edition is a game that improves your note-recognition skills by asking you to name different notes as they are played. Name as many notes as you can within the time limit to achieve a high score which you can then post to a global leader-board. Choose from 3 different difficulty levels which affect the range of notes and the time you have to name each one.

Click here to play the game now!

Want this game on your website for free? Follow these 3 simple steps:

1. Post a comment below.
2. Send me a message saying you’d like the game on your website – and remember to include a link to your site!
3. If your site meets the requirements I will email the game to the email address you used in step 2 – so make sure you use a valid address!

Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge is a viral game commissioned by Bug Interactive for the Active Ashfield initiative to help promote the launch of their new website.

The brief was to develop a sports-themed game that featured their two food-based characters (Brocky and Peggy) which would help promote healthy eating and an active lifestyle.

The result is Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge, a game that tasks the user with scoring as many conversions as they can within the two minute time limit. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds though, as you have to factor dynamic wind (both in terms of direction and speed) and variable kicking power into the mix as well!

Click here to play the game!

Name that Note is a game that improves your music-reading skills by asking you to name different notes as they appear on-screen. Name as many notes as you can within the time limit to achieve a high score which you can then post to a global leader-board. Choose from the treble and bass clefs through 3 different difficulty levels.

Click here to play the game now!

Want this game on your website for free? Follow these 3 simple steps:

1. Post a comment below.
2. Send me a message saying you’d like the game on your website – and remember to include a link to your site!
3. If your site meets the requirements I will email the game to the email address you used in step 2 – so make sure you use a valid address!

Once you put your work online, anyone can download it and make copies of it, freely pass it around and generally cost you money.

Is the only option then to stop making your work available for download? Of course such drastic measures would prevent anyone from seeing your work at all and make developing a product totally pointless, but what if there was a compromise between the two? What if there could be a difference between what you gave people and what they actually saw on-screen when they ran that file?

Having a “key” file (which I’ll refer to as the Key) to access a “resource” file (which I’ll refer to as the Resource) centrally also means only ever having one location for that Resource, and so if you were to spot a bug in your Resource or if you wanted to add a feature, you’d only have to replace a single file for that change to permeate instantly throughout the internet.

Since your Resource would only ever be run centrally, this also opens the door for tracking. You’d be able to see who was accessing your resource and how often. If the Key was to provide information on where it was being run from you’d also be able to control the locations that had access to that Resource, and in effect you’d be making an “intelligent” Key that only worked for certain people.

All of this serves as the foundation for a piece of software that I have developed and called the Game Wrapper. Although called the Game Wrapper because I wanted to use it to serve my games to different websites, the same technology would actually work with any type of resource – games, animations, elearning etc.

I use Game Wrapper to serve games to various online gaming websites, so I know that every site has the same version of the game and if I ever want to add or change something in any of my games, I make that change once and upload the new file to my server and that new version instantly becomes the version that everyone is playing.

Game Wrapper also allows me to specify whether games are allowed to be played locally on a user’s machine or online only. If online only, I can also specify which websites are allowed to play it and this ensures that no-one steals the game to use it without my permission. If the game is ever run from a site that hasn’t been added to the Allowed list, I get an email that tells me which game has been run illegally and from which website.

I can also serve adverts before the game starts to load or I can serve the game right away – whatever’s best for any particular game.

Developers will know that when a Flash file downloads another Flash file, the downloaded file is stored in “Temporary Internet Files” so the scenario with which I opened the post about ensuring that users don’t ever get access to the Resource isn’t strictly true, but despite physically being on that user’s machine the file will only run if it’s run from the host website, only if it’s run from a Key, and only if the user is on the Allowed list.

Both the Keys and the Resources are also run through SWF Encrypt for an added layer of security.