Technology Week: YouTube and Interactive Games

I participated in a contest with a focus on increasing interest in local children's data by creating an innovative and compelling message that could go viral. I wanted to create something that was innovative and had no cost associated with it except time. I finally came up with my solution: create an interactive YouTube game using my Second Life avatar as the actor and Screenr.com to shoot the in-world scenes.

The introductory video's description provides the focus of the game and notifies players that in order to be successful, they need to visit Kidsdata.org to look up the answers. The game provides highlighted boxes from which one answer must be selected to continue. Pause annotations were included to give players time to look up the answers. The countdown of this time is made visible by a small gray circle located at the upper left of the video. If this time should run out, the player can press the pause button on the video itself to get as much additional time as they need.

Whether I win or not, I am thankful for this experience as it has really helped me stretch my thinking. I've learned that a $0 budget for a project can encourage you to combine technology in a way that you may never have thought of before to produce an innovative solution. If you would like to look at my contest entry, click here.