We have launched our first math storyline! With funding from NSF's VITAL Prize , we have created the new storyline "Doody Duty", which teaches students about volume and surface area of rectangular prisms.

This storyline is available from Dr. Joel Zaleski in the Cryo-Bay. And it includes...

Here's a walkthrough of the storyline:

This storyline is currently listed under the "General" module. We will have a module particularly for Math once we have more content.

We've also made some tweaks to our argument builder. Now students can easily review their evidence before picking a claim.

Also, reasoning word buttons now have a question mark instead of a plus sign -- user testing reve

Continuing down our pathway of adding more Earth Systems/Science content, we're introducing, "Volcano!" In our new "Volcano!" storyline, students must figure out whether the research island is an active volcano that runs risk of harming the researchers working there. They also are tasked with setting up an alarm system based on warning signs of a volcanic eruption, that would allow people to leave the island safely in case it does erupt!

We are super excited to announce that our Expeditions feature is entering a Beta Testing phase! Expeditions is our new type of gameplay where students work in small groups together in a live simulation to solve a problem. Rather than using puzzle pieces and analyzing pre-created graphs, students collect samples to make their OWN graphs and write their own arguments.

We've recorded a quick slide deck video walkthrough of the experience available here.

If you would like to sign up to participate in the beta testing, please reach out to hello@tytoonline.com . We appreciate your help!

Earth Science has been our most highly demanded new content area. You ask for it, we provide it: a new Earth's Systems module now exists, adding the storyline 'Yours, Mines, and Ours.'

In this 7-quest storyline, students will try to find out where diamonds can be mined in Espeth to shore up the supply for industrial uses. Along the way, they will learn about the rock cycle, how diamonds form within the Earth, Earth’s inner structure, and how humans can extract diamonds from the ground (and elsewhere!) with the help of technology.

Though our primary focus has always been science, we've made a point to add more mathematical problem-solving to our storylines. This one is no exception: students will need to help a budding geologist calculate the relative width and depth of a pit mine that is to be constructed nearby. The sides of the pit must always maintain a 45 degree angle to avoid cave-ins, and one of the sites borders a nature preserve, which places a limit on how wide (and therefore, how deep) it can go before doing harm to the environment.

No matter what's being mined, all types of mining wreak havoc on local environments. However, we wanted to be sensitive to the fact that mining has other effects besides environmental devastation. Countless families around the world depend upon the economies created by mining industries. Communities are built around mines, and they, too, can be negatively affected when mines are abandoned or built without care.

Based on student feedback, we've made some update to player characters. They now feature bolder details, such as deeper contours and added highlights. We've also updated the default jumpsuit to be more stylish, and improved our character animations so that human characters will appear more natural and lively. We're also working on additional updates to our character art (both human and non-human!) based on student feedback.

Paleontologist Jacques is eager to find out if Ovo has a fossil record like the one on Earth. Students learn about the Law of Superposition to determine which organisms arrived on the island before or after others. Interestingly, some unidentifiable remains are found on the island. Students research two different animal species to learn about the adaptations that have allowed them to thrive on the island since arriving suddenly several decades ago, as well as what happens when an animal lacks the adaptations it needs within its habitat.

This is the first storyline in our all-new module! This module is unlocked when students have completed the final storyline in our module. You can assign the storyline (or specific quests) to your students without the necessary pre-requisites via the teacher dashboard.

Our Black History Month exhibit at the art museum has been replaced with a new exhibit honoring 24 women from all around the world! Students can click on each picture to learn their contributions to science.

One of our most-requested content topics is cell anatomy. Well, the wait is finally over! Our new storyline, 'Ice Ice Froggy,' will cover the basics of cell anatomy (focusing on the nucleus, cell membrane, mitochondria, and cell wall).

In this storyline consisting of 6 quests, students are asked to figure out why the latest shipment of cryogenically-frozen leopard frogs from Earth appear to have sustained skin damage. Students must investigate the extent of the damage by seeing which cell organelles were affected by the cold so that they can deduce what went wrong and how to fix it.

Violet has gotten her hands on four copies of a lost masterpiece by a famous Espethian painter...but which one is the real one? In this quest, students help the art curator use deductive reasoning to figure out which painting is Espeth's long-lost masterpiece!

Our old quest, 'Of Panganogs and Gepettos,' taught students about the different types of symbiotic relationships by having them investigate why geppettos tend to show up underneath a certain tree whenever panganogs start snacking on its fruits. This quest has been updated and re-titled 'Dinner for Two.' In this new version, students still learn about symbiosis, but we've added a more in-depth investigative process, fun new geppetto and panganog animations, and have moved the quest to the Island to make use of some of its unique flora!

Alicia wants to create a healthy chow specially formulated to promote panganog health. But first, she must learn how the body processes food, and what it uses the food for. By observing three panganogs during a fitness test, players learn how different nutrients affect the body.

Designing a new chow from the ground up will take time, and there will be some missteps! Students will also help Alicia figure out how to improve the chow when initial tests show less-than-stellar results. At the end of it all, students will have learned about which organs comprise the digestive system, what enzymes do, and why food has to be broken into its smallest pieces before the body can use it!

---

Tis the season! Winter has returned to Tyto with fun decorations!

You can find Joyce the Joyful shopkeeper in front of the Marketplace transit center for some winter goods!

It’s time to shake things up…with a brand-new biodome! (Or one that’s retconned to be brand-new, anyway…!) Councilwoman Nasim wants you and Supervisor Cherie to put your heads together and come with a design plan for the definitely-never-before-seen Mojave Desert biodome! There’s only one rule: it’s gotta be just right for a population of cougars. Learn about predator-prey relationships, niches, and why population size matters when you make your way up the food chain. What does it take to support an apex predator like a cougar? It might take more than you think!

This storyline covers relationships within ecosystems, and asks players to make predictions about the desert ecosystem based on data gathered from big cats in other ecosystems. 

This storyline also features significant mathematical thinking, to an extent that hasn’t been seen in any of our other storylines. “Using mathematics and computational thinking” is a Science and Engineering Practice outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards. 

We have also created some printable worksheets so that students can use a pen and paper to help them work out and keep track of the math they encounter in this storyline. (These worksheets are linked in our teacher guide.)

This storyline is accessible after ‘Panic! at the Microscope,’ the second storyline in our Cells to Organisms module. It is replacing ‘A Balanced Diet.’ All of the quests from ‘A Balanced Diet’ are now enrichment or practice quests.

---

Our sandbox-unlocking assignments used to be a one-time on/off switch - once you "unlock" it for your students, there's no way to make changes to the assignment.

To improve the flexibility, we have spent some time making sandbox assignments behave the same way as other quests. Now you can make changes or delete a sandbox-unlock quest on the Calendar just as any other quests. The completion of the quest would unlock the sandbox, and reassigning or resetting the quest won't revoke the access.

---

'Tis the season to be spooky! The game world has been decorated and Ulna the "Normal" Shopkeeper has returned with Halloween items. Students can find her around the transit center of the Tyto Commons.

Ulna the Normal Shopkeeper is at the transit center of the Tyto Commons.

---

The styles of the in-game maps have been updated to be cleaner and more functional. Decorations are omitted to not draw attention from what's important, and popular locations such as "Whipper Snippers" (where you can redesign your character) have been labeled.

---

In addition to the new storyline, we’ve also added a screen that will tell you when the game has crashed because of something you might be able to fix on your end. Hopefully, being more specific about why the game isn’t cooperating will help to get you and your students back to playing that much faster!

We have been working for almost a year with our partners at Wonder Interactive to streamline our asset downloading and loading process, and finally we are ready to release! Loading is much faster, an average of 45% faster when loading from cache (i.e. on subsequent visits, not the first one when it is first downloading), to make ongoing playing faster to get back into the game!

Together with the server improvements released a couple of weeks ago, the general waiting time and performance once in the game should be largely improved. We would love to hear your feedback on how it’s feeling for you!

We have also added Spanish definitions for key vocabulary in our game, based on requests from districts looking for even more ELL supports than those we already have. This is our first step towards localization – we will expand the language support to other parts of the content and include more languages in the future. Please reach out with requests so we can see interest and decide on the order of importance to implement!

English is used as default for the vocabulary definitions. To change the glossary language, go to “Game Options” in the “Options” menu and select the language in the drop-down. This will save the preferences for each student account.

With our increasing number of users, we have decided to utilize GameLift (a service provided by Amazon Web Services) to easily launch, update, and scale game servers so that we can scale to massive numbers of user supports.

We are trying a lot of things to improve frame rate, including making sure that not everything is rendering (showing up on the screen) at the same time, especially complex models like characters. This is called “occlusion” — when you can hide objects behind blockers, such as walls, so that it doesn’t render and take up computer resources. We have this working better, and have added some tall decorations to block the view of characters and made sure that they won’t be rendered when being blocked. This means you should experience less lag and better overall performance.

One of the awesome things about video game art is how technical it is. We’ve had to update our maps significantly in order to increase performance, and our technical improvements gave us the space to add a lot more life to the game world.

We’ve been joking that Marysol finally got her funding and the clinic has moved from the bottom floor of the apartments to its own new building! We’ve moved all the quests that took place in the clinic to this new location, and spread things out. Looks better and has better performance!

(https://canny.io/images/4d7287a82b5cc766391cb1b002b160cc.png)

Having more options for pets was one of the most popular requests from students, so we added a new pet shop with 30+ new pets, including both real-life animals and the unique animals of Ovo.

The student dashboard has been totally revamped with access to resources, and most importantly: should save 1-2 minutes of load time to get students into learning activities faster! 🙌

To get students to where they need to be more quickly, we have moved the class-selection process from the game to the learning dashboard and programmed the game to send students directly in front of the character that handles their first assignment for the day.

Students can log in at account.tytoonline.com to access the dashboard, and play the game by clicking on a class. This student dashboard is not only faster to load than the in-game class selection screen, but it also shows the student whether they have pending assignments for each class. (* Note: sandbox unlocks are not displayed in the dashboard.)

If you have been telling your students to directly go to play.tytoonline.com, you don’t have to ask them to switch to log in through account.tytoonline.com instead. They will see the same in-game class selection as before if they have multiple classes, or it will be automatically skipped if they only have one class. They will still go directly to the character that gives them their first assignment, too!

We have fixed the bug that sometimes assignments of a storyline would appear out of order in the Calendar if they are on the same day.