Education
We are passionate about the transformative effect of new technologies on education and learners. We are constantly learning ourselves (new software, new hardware, new methods, new collaborations) and this informs the work that we create for schools, educational institutions, companies and cultural organisations.
Our core products: Moovl, Sodaplay, Sodarace and Newtoon are designed to foster creative exploration, and to equip learners with new tools and skills to better understand and communicate concepts, whether through drawings, animations, model-building or model-manipulation.
Our suite of learning products is growing, along with our expertise in designing and building learning games and learning interventions. Clients who have sought our help include the BBC, Pearson Education, Channel 4, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Egg Bank, London Business School, Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnerships, Futurelab and the British Council.
Kirsten’s community of educational games makers is growing and growing. As of early April we have nearly 600 members, with new members appearing in Cambodia, Brazil and Finland.
Soda has just finished post user testing modifications to six exhibits for Mishkat Interactive Centre for Atomic and Renewable Energy in Riyadh. It is the first Science exploration center in Saudi Arabia’s capital and aims to get Saudi youth involved in the thinking about the scientific, technological and economic issues behind their country’s role as a major energy producer and to investigate alternative energy sources.
Soda was commissioned by Love to Learn, a new arm of Pearson Education focusing on senior citizens. Our brief was to develop a series of memory training games to accompany the online memory training course, based on the popular book, ‘Brilliant Memory Training’ by Jonathan Hancock.
We’ve been working with the folks at A New Direction and Creative Intelligence Agency to work with young people to make digital artwork around the theme of Olympic Truce.
We’re also running the social media campaign for the project, which kicked off with the website launch. Graphic Design by Sunil Pawar of Slingshot London and web design by Garry Hill of Magnetised.
You can see some of the other collaborations between artists and young people at:
Our Board Games Special proved to be a popular and inspiring event. As a primarily digital games maker, I found the focus on board and card games very interesting, and the discussions around how they do and don’t differ quite useful.
Fiddian was delighted to be invited by the Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group to contribute to a discussion entitled Design and Tech City: Local Skills and Young People.
Kirsten organised and hosted another meetup for London’s educational apps developers at the Centre for Creative Collaboration. February’s focus was on ‘strategies for success’ in the battlezone that is the educational software market.
In April 2011, Kirsten set up #LEGup, a group for those making educational games and apps, thinking about making them or just interested in the application of new technology to education. The aim was to link people involved in or interested in getting involved in making educational games and apps.
With the help of funding from Futurelab Soda developed Newtoon to advanced prototype level.
Soda created the website irrepressible.info for Amnesty International UK. The campaign aimed to raise awareness of internet censorship and the role of big businesses in helping repressive governments to control the flow of information to their people.
Soda worked with the Tate and British Council to produce Nahnou Together, which enabled young people in Damascus and London to exchange visual artworks that had cultural significance for them.
The Vision London website was set up in 2005 as an online space for young people, schools and creative practitioners to present and discuss the outcomes of partnership projects that considering personal journeys from 2005 to 2012.
Soda’s commitment to working with children in learning and regeneration contexts is exemplified by ‘Energy’ - an Arts Council/Creative Partnerships funded 30-metre-tall external light installation at Stoke Newington School, London.
Camden Arts Centre’s three year school project ‘Art and New Technology’ reached a culmination in June 2003 with an exhibition at Swiss Cottage Library.
Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnership asked us to develop an interactive learning game about the City of London for 12- and 13-year-olds living in areas surrounding the City.
Soda developed three courseware projects for London Business School as well as running a series of informal Java workshops for LBS developers.
The sound of sodaconstructor reverberated around the 2001 Sonar festival in Barcelona, where crowds could both hear and touch a menagerie of sodaconstructions. Powerful speakers and a large touch sensitive plasma-screen enabled the audience to grab models from the sodazoo and physically throw them around the screen to a cacophony of dynamically generated sound.
The financial application service provider Traderserve employed Soda to help design a fully graphical model-building interface as part of their service to automated traders.
Pricewaterhouse Coopers came to Soda looking for a creative solution to a specific training need within their evolving global organisation.
Originally commissioned by the online bank Egg, Loyalty was a Customer Relationship Management training game used to focus CRM training sessions.
A set of three dynamic learning environments was created in conjunction with BBC Education: The Rap Realm, The World of Wonderwords and The Simile Satellite.
Play is central to our philosophy; it fosters an experimental and uninhibited approach to creativity. Our playing created sodaconstructor, an online construction kit for building animated models, winner of the 2001 Interactive Arts BAFTA Award.
Live on the BBC Education website since 1997, Mapamatic Desert Challenge is a Java game designed to teach basic maths skills to secondary school pupils.