The Times Educational Supplement (TES) is a well known organisation in the UK that aims to provide potential, new and existing teachers with everything they require; from job listings and useful information to online tools and interactive learning games. TES approached Aerian Studios with an exciting project that combined our web development and online flash animation / games skills to create an interactive learning game for children. The fact that this project had a two week deadline made this project even more appealing as we are always on the hunt for a challenge!

Initially we began the development of the website (based on the supplied website designs). The website uses html/CSS and JavaScript to deliver a compelling user experience, providing teachers with lesson plans and assets that accompany the 12 games of Christmas, while also delivering the games as standalone end points.

The flash application is aimed at a young audience, with lots of animation and impact, while keeping everything simple, robust and snappy. To keep the control robust and loading times down, we split the application into very small parts, controlled by a main shell that intelligently loads in assets as they are needed or caches them if there is available bandwidth. Due to the short deadline a number of techniques were derived, a great example of this was the creation of a action script 3 object that automatically lip synced Santa’s mouth to the sound clip that played. This saved a massive amount of time that would have been spent manually animating every sound clip.

We really have loved working on this project and working with the team at TES made it a joy for all involved. Please do visit the URL and see this project in action, we really are proud of this and very happy to say the project launched as scheduled and we hit our 2 week deadline! Great work team!