Virtual Pet Project [Pepperdine OMAET Video]

Pepperdine OMAET – EDC640/641: Introduction to Distributed Learning – Fall 2001

The assignment was to create an interactive program/website using the Tamagotchis “virtual pets” as a model. I used Flash for my project and learned a lot about overkill and making better tool choices for projects.

Instructions:

PC smoke

What is a Virtual Pet?

Gary Stager explains:

In 1997, millions of little digital computers costing less than $20 were purchased by children around the world. These virtual pets wets were connected to key chains and know as Giga-Pets, Nano-pets, Tamagotchis and variations on the terms digital, personal, virtual or pet. Kids fell in love with controlling and caring for these pets. The predictable response of most schools was to ban them. (There seems to be a causal relationship between things kids love and things school bans. Remember what a terrible threat POGS or baseball cards posed to contemporary education?) Thoughtful educators realized that these digital pets provided children with a personal connection to systems thinking, senses, emotions, artificial life, computer science, cybernetics, probability, elapsed time, human development and other complex concepts. While most schools were prohibiting these “pets,” Logo teachers around the world were independently developing Logo-based activities which used digital pets as a powerful motivational force for learning. Adam Smith, an Australian educator and software developer (www.schoolkit.com) devised a simple set of starter procedures for creating a digital pet. The project introduces buttons and text boxes. Students with little MicroWorlds programming experience may successfully create a digital pet and add their own personality traits to their creature.

What is a Personal Pet?
Your Personal Pet can be anything you would like it to be, a dog, a horse… or something imaginary. (You may simulate all sorts of natural systems this way. Recent Logo Exchange Teacher Feature, Josie Hopkins’ students made Tamaseedis – virtual plants to care for.) Say ‘Hi’ to Stroops, my Personal Pet! Caring for Your Personal Pet
Like all pets, Stroops has needs and feelings. When you adopt your pet, it will get hungry, so you will need to feed it. To keep it happy, you will need to hug it regularly. Once you have adopted a pet you may like to add more characteristics. For example, you might like to have your pet become lonely unless you play games with it.

My Journal from My Flash Experience:

2001-09-10 white-cow-in-a-blizzard flash project

The Flash “Learning Curve”
While the rest of you were grabbing clipart and experimenting with programming your V-Pet’s behavior, I spent two-weeks working my way through a couple tutorials which eventually led to the following V-Pet experiment (image: to the right) One More Time, With Feeling
Admittedly my first attempt left me pretty empty. After as many hours as I had spent with the “Flash 5 Bible” I was hoping for something a bit more visual and animated. My second attempt seemed to fit that bill, but still something was lacking.
https://youtu.be/pCaPXuxi_ms Help Joe Work On His Project
Between versions 0.01 and this version I had a chance to check-out the other v-pets being created by my cadre compadres. It immediately struck me that using Flash on this project was a bit like building a top-fuel dragster from scratch for a 5-K foot race (just a bit too much horse power for the job). But this experience also inspired me to create the v-pet (game). The Flash “movie” is not nearly as interactive as I had hoped but it took me 24-hours to figure out the rudimentary program branching. I’ve posted videos of a version without buttons and a screen-capture video of the version with buttons.