Mission 206: Terrific Toy Factory

Team Size: 13

Timeframe: 3 months

Sprint Timeframe: 5 weeks

Role: Interactive Editor

Key Contributions: Challenge 3

Learning Prompt: Identifies Blends

Date Sprint Completed: May 2021

In episode six of Noggin’s second season of Missions, the player is asked by the owner of the “Terrific Toy Factory” to help get the factory’s mechanisms moving, and to help get the toys into the hands of the kids at Nogginville. The player must complete a series of challenges that encourages understanding of different letter blends for various word families.

I worked on this Mission as part of a 5-week timeframe in May 2021 alongside two other interactive editors and the majority of the core team. In charge of crafting the programmatic logic for Challenge 3 (C3), I was tasked with setting up a series of a drag-and-drop interactions that gauge whether you’ve dragged the correct answer (CA) or not (WA). The logic here was a little trickier given the things meant to disable touch input (i.e. various audio prompts, such as WA audio or TO (timeout) audio) and the things meant to only disable select letters.

In addition, “interaction randomization logic” was requested for each challenge, meaning at for every playthrough, the order in which the interactions of the challenge are played changes. So, I had to add a series of checks interspersed within the source video to set and track the order of the interaction keyframes. Below, you can see three different playthroughs of three different orders of the interactions.

As is the case with most Noggin missions, there are three separate “levels” in my Challenge (a total of 9 interactions), in which a player’s assigned “level” of difficulty is determined based on a player’s performance in experiences across the Noggin app.

My playthrough of this Mission is across Level 1 (L1), but Levels 2 and 3 (L2, L3) of the challenge are fairly similar to the first level in terms of logic. L2 simply changes the aesthetics of the letter tiles to be of more complicated letter blends, whilst L3 adds an additional “wrong answer” tile. This added a layer of complexity of the disable/enable elements of the wrong answer tiles at the highest level (see below).