Team Size: 17
Timeframe: 4 months
Sprint Timeframe: 5 weeks
Role: Interactive Editor
Key Contributions: i2, i6 (Magnet, SWYK)
Learning Prompt: What is the difference in objects that are magnetic vs. not magnetic? (Applied Sciences)
Date Sprint Completed: September 2022
Welcome to Imanolo’s toy shop! He makes all kinds of toys, but some of his favorites have magnetic parts, so let’s make a new toy with magnetic parts, In this last episode of Noggin’s “On the Job” series.
I worked on this project during a five-week sprint timeframe starting in August 2022, and was in charge of the “main” magnet interaction as well as the end of the experience where you test your knowledge.
The way On the Jobs typically work is that, after watching an embedded documentary video explaining the process of the given job, you then work through a series of smaller interactions that typically involve building some kind of material that is customizable. At the end of this experience, you are tasked with “Show What You Know” (SWYK) in a small interaction that tests what the player has learned.
The main draw of On the Job (OTJ) 110 is that your experience is customizable from the get-go, as you can play through the experience building a toy dog (as seen in my full playthrough), or a caterpillar, or a train (see below).
The lead interactive editor, Bianca Ignacio, was in charge of all of the customization logic that goes on in the middle of the experience, so to best manage this, I took on the magnet interaction (that exists independently of all of the customization) as well as SWYK at the end.
Though I had a prototype made by team leader Emma Assin to go off of, the interaction itself (which combines a straightforward drag interaction whilst also locking movement along a pannable line at the top of the screen) had plenty to add.
This included balancing of the different magnetic parts that wiggle as you get closer to them and ultimately swing into the magnet upon completion. To do so, these objects needed to rotate downward and then become invisible, so that “completed” versions of these images, in pre-attached positions on the magnet, can then become visible instead (in a process that needs to be seamless).
SWYK also required some precision as well, as the shots of Blue lowering a magnet towards one of the objects were built into the source video, so i6 needed to seek around the source video to different points depending on if the player gets a correct answer or gets a wrong answer.
As of October 2023, this ended up being the last On the Job in the series, but this experience was well-received by kids and rated one of Noggin’s more popular On the Jobs alongside OTJ102 (see my explanation here) and OTJ104 (view it on the Noggin app here)
Matthew Floyd 