Kenny: When we're using the Buddy scenario, the two main learning outcomes from an English point of view would be to explore the characterisation of Buddy, in other words, they're trying to find out a bit more about Buddy, type of person that he is what he does, what his thoughts are, the people that he interacts with and the places that he visits, such as the school and his home and obviously his family are important as well.
The other main outcome or objective would be that we are looking to improve their reading and comprehension skills. That's kind of an underlying theme that was in my mind when I developed the Buddy scenario and in particular we're looking at improving sentence construction and providing practice, a kind of a drilling practice, in the use of adverbs, adjectives, the use of apostrophe, and that kind of thing. I was trying to produce something that appealed to a wide range of learning styles, in particular there is textual information that appeals to linguistic styles.
There's quite a lot of multimedia which is visual and appeals to visual styles, they have to follow a path through the adventure, they must go from location to location, they must decide which way to go, which is more of a logical style and there are some activities that could be regarded as being kinaesthetic, because they have to fill in gaps, that kind of thing. But there's also musical clips that are included to help create the environment and that's another style which is the, the musical learner style.
I realise that a lot of kids nowadays spend a lot of time in front of computers playing games like The Sims, Age of Empires, that kind of thing, where they're immersed in this kind of environment, and that perhaps was one of the thoughts that led towards the Buddy scenario that kids generally tend to react quite positively to this kind of environment.