Kerpoof
This week's assignment was to evaluate the Kerpoof site. Here are my general findings:
I am operating under the assumption that this site is geared towards preoperational kids (approx. 3-8 years old), so I decided to dive right in and not look at the instructions. Because what five year old has time for instructions!?!
Make a Picture – Easy to understand, wide selection of tools. All-around fun! At one point I placed an image behind one of the objects in the background. I am still not sure how I managed that, but it is a great option to have.
Make a Story – Fun to use, the animated clips are a nice touch. However, I am not sure if I am missing something…should the animated clips actually move anywhere? Or should all images be static like a classic storybook? If so, I am not sure I truly understand the point in making some images animated.
Make a Movie – I could not understand how to use this potion of the site at all. That being said, this could have a lot to do with my knowledge of Flash. I went into this project assuming that the movie “timeline” should operate as Flash does. It does not. And I am totally confused. However, I do like the basic idea of providing children with a movie making, Flash-like capabilities.
Suggestions:
-Tool tips would be nice to have for the action buttons. For instance, it would be nice to place your mouse over the dynamite button to read that it will delete, before you click on it and potentially loose your work that you wanted to keep.
-At one point I received this error: “TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
at kerpoof.studio::clear_tool/start()
at kerpoof.studio::clear_tool/handle_drop()
at kerpoof.display::ksprite_ui_manager/::handle_drop()TypeError:
I am not sure exactly what I did to generate this error, but I believe I was trying to drag the dynamite icon onto a story.
-Allow users to utilize all of the icons/movie clips for all scenes. There are so many fun images it is a shame to limit the user and only allow them to be used in certain places.