Andy Thelwell — User Experience Designer

I researched, designed and built this multi-award-winning Flash-based online learning experience for kids as part of my BA (Hons.) Interactive Multimedia course.

Working For:	My Degree
Year:	2002 - 2003
My Responsibilites:	Everything!
Technologies:	Flash, HTML, JavaScript

The Blobz Guide to Electric Circuits is an interactive learning tool to support Units 4F and 6G of the National Curriculum for Key Stage 2 Science -- namely "Circuits and Conductors" and "Changing Circuits" respectively.

The Guide is designed to be tactile and 'hands on' in order to make this as rich a learning experience as possible. It combines various teaching methods in a product that is both educational and entertaining. In it, kids learn about the basic principles of electric circuits, about the need for a complete circuit and a power source to be present. They learn about how switches work, about which materials make good conductors, how the length and thickness of wires affects the current in a circuit, and how circuit diagrams can be used to describe circuits.

This project, one of my most fulfilling pieces of work to date, was developed as part of the Hypermedia module at Staffordshire University, as part of my B.A. (Hons.) Interactive Multimedia degree. For this piece, I got the opportunity to do a great deal of real user-centered design work, working with a class of primary school children and their teacher to carry out research into their learning habits, their preferences and peculiarities with regards to characters and language, and most of all the way in which they interacted with computers.

The Blobz Guide to Electric Circuits won the Web/Educational category of the 2003 SIGGRAPH SPICE competition, an award of excellence from the 2004 Association of Educational Computing Technology International Student Media Festival, and was a finalist in the 2004 South by Southwest (SXSW) Web Awards. It has received over 25,000 unique visitors to date, and I regularly receive emails from kids and teachers saying just how much they enjoy using it.