UT Excel Tool

I cooked up a little Excel tool using VBA to randomize the doors for the last Newman/Lewis educational UT quiz. Point the directory to the bitmap folder, setup the files to be randomized on the left column and click the three buttons on the right sequentially. This will randomize the filenames. You then just need to import the bitmaps into the "quiz" texture package using UT editor.

This is a very rough hack to speed up the process of making new quizzes but is not meant to be user-friendly (yet). Use at your own risk. Make sure your files are backed up before using.

EduFrag meet on Monday

The next EduFrag Meeting will be on Monday Oct 24 at 11:00 in 4020 MacAllister.
Any students interesting in developing UT maps or doors are welcome to attend. Just email me first so I know how many people are coming.

OrgoFrag004LewisNewman

Here is the Educational Unreal Tournament quiz to be used for the race in CHEM 241 workshop on Friday Oct 21. It is a 20 room map redesigned with larger rooms so that it is much harder to accidentally walk into a door. It is basically the randomized combined Newman projection and Lewis structure quizzes.

Instructions are the same as usual.

Technical notes:
I have also cleaned up some stuff that only map developers would notice. Since teleporters always link to PlayerStarts between maps in the educational version of UT, I simplified the teleporter pointers to just "study#" or "room01#", instead of specifying a teleporter.

OrgoFrag003Newman

Karyn has updated the text on the doors of her Newman projection map. Currently the study room is still about Lewis structures though. Students can use to practice for a test and for a race on Friday.

Download the map here. Instructions are in the readme file and here.

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OrgoFrag002 Student Map

Karyn has created a set of doors to practice Newman projections and nomenclature for her extra credit assignment. Currently the study room is still about Lewis structures though. Students can use to practice for a test and for a race on Friday.

Download the map here. Instructions are in the readme file and here.

Put your comments on this post.

OrgoFrag winner

Since nobody won the Unreal Tournament on Lewis structure on Wednesday we tried again on the Friday class. Mike Aquino completed the quiz within 2 minutes and another student shortly after. That tells me that there was probably some practicing going on, which is the point of these exercises, after all. Many of the other students continued playing after the race was over and I think that is a positive indicator. Every time you go through the map you should be able more and more to recognize correct and incorrect Lewis structures instinctively.

The game design here has no weapons and uses the light (15 Meg) educational version of Unreal Tournament. It played well on all laptops.

OrgoFrag Race

Here are the maps and textures for the OrgoFrag Race this morning.

The instructions are the same as before.

Four students played but after 15 minutes the class time was up and nobody won. We'll resume the race on Friday. The molecular model set is still available as the prize.

Randomization in Educational UT

Organic chemistry and library quizzes set up as maps in the Educational version of Unreal Tournament have been available for a few weeks now. The students running the library quizzes found that the correct answer was always in the same place relative to the spawning location and direction. This has now been fixed and the corrected maps have been uploaded to the wiki.

For the map developers:
This seems to be an issue with the educational version of UT. In the commercial version, when you teleport to a new map you can specify the teleporter where you want to materialize. In the educational version, it looks like it ignores all teleporters in the next map and you end up at the PlayerStart position. In addition, if there are multiple PlayerStarts, you end up in the most recently added one every time so this can't be used to randomize either. The solution I used was to put a single PlayerStart at random locations and pointing in different directions in each map.