Earlier this month, we hosted a local high school student for a week of work experience. The aim of the scheme is to provide an opportunity for students to prepare for the world of work and develop their employability skills. Freddie carried out some market research, did some VR testing and built his own interactive learning game. He also wrote a few blogs, including this one.
During my week at Near-Life for my work experience I was able to learn how to use the tool and create my own game. And use their built in AI tools to create images to make it better and more engaging.
Day 1
On my first day at Near Life I was getting used to using their creator tool by signing up to a free trial for their platform and creating my own basic game using the tutorial and info they have on their Academy, which made everything very simple for me to get to grips with as the tutorials were quick and easy to follow.
Day 2
Following these tutorials I was able to add more depth to my game by importing external media such as photos and videos. And then by using buttons I had more control of the story of my very simple game. By the end of my second day at Near-Life I had begun work on my own revision game for GCSE History about King John and the First Barons War.
Day 3
My third day at Near-Life was spent focusing on improving my game by implementing my prior knowledge about the tool that I had learnt in the previous days. For example, I used the AI image generation tool to create images of the King, the opposing Barons and the King’s son Henry who inherited the crown off of his father after the end of the war. Also I used text overlays inside of the game to provide the users with information about the topic helping them to learn.
Day 4
On my fourth day, I spent some more time finishing up my game by adding in a quiz at the end of it to help with the knowledge retention of the users as immersive content can help the knowledge retention of learners by up to 90%.
Then, I created a presentation upon the market research I had conducted to produce a SWOT analysis for Near-Life.
Day 5
On my final day, I had the privilege of joining a Near-Life marketing call where I was able to see the analytics of the Near-Life website with the Google information but also the YouTube statistics: view count etc. And, understand more about the target audience of Near-Life and where the majority of its users were coming from.