Task 1 - Barbie Website

We started our search with the help of Google. We searched ‘Barbie’ because that is our theme. We scanned the results (first page only) and chose the most exciting. This happened to be the official Barbie website. www.barbie.everythinggirl.com/
The homepage was bright and colourful with lots of enticing links to many activities. The main colour was pink amongst other very girly colours. It was very much made for girls in mind. Many things moved and there were sounds including music and voices of Barbie and selected pet. The whole website was multi-modal throughout and made reading necessary but fun.

The activity that we chose to begin with was entitled ‘Decorate page’ which gave us the opportunity to choose a Barbie and named her after Marie. We chose her clothing style and her pet from a choice of dog, cat and rabbit. The chosen pet of rabbit followed us around throughout our visit. We also chose the decoration of home page which was Barbie’s lounge.

The main activity was a game in which we had to complete numerous tasks on an adventure to find the wand which would save her parents from being turned into stone by the wicked wizard. The game was colourful and exciting throughout and offered the opportunity to wear 3D glasses with the animations. Each task started with the next part of the story in written text situated at the left hand side of the screen. The writing was of an appropriate mystical font.
This provided a purpose for reading as children would have to read the story in order to complete the adventure. The tasks began with no more than 3 instructions for each game and assisted by an image. We found the most valuable multi-modal activity was where there were hidden letters within the picture and the player had to find these letters to reveal a hidden word, which was part of the clue to win the adventure. This would be easily accessible and useful for the classroom.