Monday 24 October 2016

Ninja Cat and Zombie Dinosaur

In this 8 minute video, I demonstrated the typing game Ninja Cat & Zombie Dinosaurs.

As the Ninja cat you need to destroy the zombie dinosaurs by typing letters, words and numbers correctly.

The strengths of the game are that;

It is free and can be accessed in any browser.

It has a sophisticated “game” feel to it. The graphics are quite modern, the music haunting.

Entertaining animations and sounds that will motivate quite a wide age range of children

Three difficulty levels (mostly based around speed of reaction) typing different letter and number combinations.

If you like your statistics, when you finish a game, you are given bucket loads of them

The game can be made larger using the Zoom facility in a browser.

The weaknesses of the game are that;

The size of the graphics are too small. The character Ninja cat is too small as are the target letters.

I think that it is too busy or complicated for a child with a visual impairment.

Also you might have to watch a video ad before you play it.

Although the game has lots of difficulty levels, it is still quite limited.

Although there are different levels, these don’t appear to have much structure to them apart from speed.

For instance, there is no specific focus on just the home row or just numbers.

The video comes with a full set of subtitles but if you want to read from a full transcript, please find one below.

Start of Video Transcript

Hello everyone. It is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.

In this video I am going to demonstrate a touch typing game called Ninja Cat and Zombie Dinosaurs which has been designed for children but is also entertaining enough to be loved by adults to!

The best way to find it is to search for “Ninja Cat and Zombie Dinosaurs” in Google.

It can be found on the website typing.com.

Because of sound effects, it is difficult to describe the game as I am playing and so I will try to either play the game or describe it.

Now, onto the game itself.

If we have a quick look at the settings, there are three levels of difficulty in this game; Easy, Medium and Hard.

You can personalise it by typing in your name.

You can adjust the volume- the sounds and the music.

Click on back and then click on start.

Let’s have a look at the easy level.

I am having to type two letter combinations and these come at me from every direction. It includes having to type in capital letters. But the pace of the game is quite slow.

Let’s have a look at the medium level.

the letter combinations appear more quickly- the pace of the game has increased.

They include some capital letters and numbers, words and phrases.

And finally, the hard level.

On the hard level, the pace is even faster and the words phrases and combinations are more complex.

So that is my quick demonstration of Ninja Cat.

Thinking about the game in terms of pros or cons.

Pros

It is free and can be accessed in any browser.

It has a sophisticated “game” feel to it. The graphics are quite modern, the music haunting.

Entertaining animations and sounds that will motivate quite a wide age range of children

Three difficulty levels (mostly based around speed of reaction) typing different letter and number combinations.

If you like your statistics, when you finish a game, you are given bucket loads of them

The game can be made larger using the Zoom facility in a browser

Cons

The size of the graphics are too small. The character Ninja cat is too small as are the target letters.

I think that it is too busy or complicated for a child with a visual impairment.

Also you might have to watch a video ad before you play it.

Although the game has lots of difficulty levels, it is still quite limited.

Although there are different levels, these don’t appear to have much structure to them apart from speed.

For instance, there is no specific focus on just the home row or just numbers.  

Thanks for watching my video tour of Ninja Cat.

I am not a keen fan of this game but  I think it will appeal to children who like to play games on their computers.

If this video has helped you, please share it with your friends, colleagues  and family.

I have created lots of other videos relating to touch typing and there is a link to my playlist below.

If you have any comments or questions or anything to add to the discussion, please leave them below.


End of video transcript

No comments:

Post a Comment