Historyhunt launched

(28th November 2002)

Historyhunt is an exciting computer game for children, available from 29 November at www.historyhunt.co.uk. It is aimed at 7-11 year olds doing KS2 history and is a fun, but accurate look at 5 important periods of history: Romans, Saxons, Medieval, Tudor and Victorians.

Historyhunt has been produced for St Albans Museums by Netcel Ltd - a local web development company and funded by the European Union – Information Society Technologies (IST) fund.

The overall scenario is that the mischievous Norse god Loki has taken many treasures from the museum and scattered them back through time, the aim is to play a game in each period and recover the stolen artefacts. Along the way the children learn about each period of history e.g. what foods they did and didn’t have and learn about some significant artefacts they could come into the museum and look at later. The user testing also showed that playing helped their literacy and ICT skills.

Historyhunt was written in Flash MX and tested extensively on over 200 children, many of their ideas were incorporated before it was finally completed. Baroness Cathy Ashton, Schools Minister will be making the official speech at the launch of the game on Friday 29 November at Wheatfields School, St Albans.

During the user trials a competition was held for the best suggestion of a name for the new game. This was won by Jamie Telkman, aged 10, as part of his prize the principal character in historyhunt has been named after him. Kerry Pollard MP and the Mayor CLLR Keith Stammers will be handing out prizes at the official launch and welcoming the wide variety of guests from industry, government and education.

For more information contact Alison Coles, 01727 751817, email a.coles@stalbans.gov.uk, website www.stalbansmuseums.org.uk

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