Our award-winning apps for Plum Landing have received a fresh coat of digital paint. Find the latest version of Plum’s Photo Hunt and the Plum’s Creaturizer at iTunes!
Category: Plum Landing
The city is full of nature—you just have to know where to look! In the PLUM LANDING HTML5 game, Wild City Search, kids move around a virtual city block, interacting with natural and man-made elements. They can pick up trash, help a rabbit build a nest, create puddles by making it rain—and much more!
Each interaction is rewarded with a seed, which kids can plant and tend in a virtual rooftop garden. As time goes by, day changes to night and back to day, plants grow, animals move around, and new interactions become possible.
It’s available now on pbskids.org and the PBS Kids Games App. Try it out – what city nature can you find?
We’ve reviewed and published over 6,000 photos from kids using our award-winning (and free!) Plum’s Photo Hunt app.
Boosted by sunshine and a large number of school downloads, our award-winning app for Plum Landing, Plum’s Creaturizer just rolled over 500,000 on the downloads odometer.
This is one of three free apps for Plum Landing designed and built by our inhouse team. The common goal of each is to get kids and families outside to have fun and practice some scientific critical-thinking skills.
The Creaturizer is available for Apple and Android devices.
Major funding for PLUM LANDING is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Kendeda Fund. Additional funding is provided by the Northern Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Our latest app for Plum Landing is a bit different.
Designed for classroom use and built in Unity, it features a navigable island in which players explore Land and Water (with a grade 2 curriculum.)
Journey around the island and pick up trash to unlock information about specific landforms and water bodies which includes videos and ground-level and aerial images. Students use the game and associated supports to observe, identify, and record characteristics of common landforms and water bodies as they navigate and represent the landscape from an aerial perspective on a map.
Support materials are at PBS LearningMedia where you can find a desktop version of the app that’s suitable for Chromebooks as well as a Background Essay, and Teaching Tips.
This resource was developed through WGBH’s Bringing the Universe to America’s Classrooms project, in collaboration with NASA. Click here for the full collection of resources.
App Team: Dan, Lizzy, Bill, Jeff, Sophie, Gentry, Alan, and Mariee with game design advice from Nicolas and tremendous support from Rachel, Laura and the rest of this project’s education team.
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The material contained in this product is based upon work supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award No. NNX16AD71A. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
More here.
Plum’s Island Explorer: Land and Water – a Classroom Activity for Grades K-2
Navigate around the island to explore various landforms and water bodies in this interactive Unity game from PLUM LANDING.
Journey around the island and pick up trash to unlock information about specific landforms and water bodies which includes videos and ground-level and aerial images. Students use the game and associated supports to observe, identify, and record characteristics of common landforms and water bodies as they navigate and represent the landscape from an aerial perspective on a map.
For best results, play this game in full-screen in Chrome or Firefox.
This activity is funded by NASA under cooperative agreement award No. NNX16AD71A. Any opinions, finding, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Award review:
It’s about half-way through summer as I write this review and that’s just long enough for the “I’m bored!” and “What are we doing today?” to start. And, there’s only so much time the kids should be spending playing Minecraft and Terraria or watching seemingly infinite amounts of YouTube videos, no matter how educational they may be. Our family likes to spend time outdoors, but sometimes, it’s hard to come up with ideas for what to do, especially with children of various ages. Enter PBS Kids’ new app, Outdoor Family Fun with Plum. The app features over 150 missions that can be viewed all at once or as daily offerings. All the missions are designed to get families out and about exploring the environment around them. There are counting activities (e.g., counting squirrels, flowers, clouds, etc.) as well as Scavenger Hunts (e.g., cloud shapes, colors at the park, leaves, etc.). Some of the missions even entail snapping pics of animals and environments (e.g., leaves, sunny spots, etc.). No worries if your family starts a mission and can’t complete it, you can easily stop and pick it right back up another day, because the app tracks progress against any and all missions— even multiple missions going at the same time.
And the Plum Landing website also snagged a Silver:
Celebrating our recent efforts at Plum Landing.
The inspiration for — and voice of — Izz Green of our environmental project Meet the Greens is just completing her real-life degree in Marine Science.
In this new interview, you can read about how the real Izz Green traveled across the world to help understand and conserve mangrove trees.
For more mangrove fun check out Plum Landing:
Digital Things! 