What a week!

Children playing ‘Adventures with Lex’

Well – what an exciting week this has been. On Friday I travelled up to Newcastle to collect our 40 tablets from Enigma, newly loaded up with our game – Adventures with Lex. This journey involved a road trip, a rickety train trip and a walk on foot trundling empty suitcases down an everlasting flight of stone steps (I was very grateful to Enigma for providing a taxi back to the station). All worth it though – as it was amazing to see Lex come to life. He really does arrive in a space ship and you really can spin the wheel to choose a place to visit. Cool. And you really can make an alien pet. Very cool.
On Monday the rest of the team got to meet Lex and get acquainted with the game for only a very short time before heading into St Peter’s School on Tuesday for our pilot study. I was grateful to Jo and Elee for insisting that the tablets would not need charging for another 100 hundred hours – so helping me to resist the urge to charge them all again (although I did still dream that I had to charge them – yes, really).
We had our usual warm welcome at St Peter’s and it seemed appropriate that the year 5 children were the first to test out the game, as they had been the children who we worked with back in May 2013 when Jack (and the Beanstalk) was put on trial in their playground. The tablets held their charge, the game worked – and the children from year 5 and then year 4 responded with huge enthusiasm and excitement. Thank you St Peter’s! We made a game! Cool. Really cool.