Media & Entertainment
An Online Community for Educational Games and Social Sharing
A US software company commissioned a community website combining educational games, embeddable widgets and social features on DotNetNuke.
- Client
- US software company
- Platform
- DotNetNuke CMS
- Audience
- Educational-game community
- Scale requirement
- Hundreds of thousands concurrent
Client & project background
Educational games within a social community
The client was an emerging US software design and development company. It wanted a community where people, especially children, could play educational games together and share their thoughts.
Requirements included a trivia-creation form for educational questions, one-on-one battles and tournaments, and game widgets that users could play directly or place on their own websites.
The community also needed news, blogs and forums. Every module and the site structure had to integrate with an existing DotNetNuke CMS product. Security and real-time interaction with Flash games were explicit requirements.
Discovery & design
Turning initial ideas into modules and business flows
The initial requirements were broad, so the first development phase focused on collecting and clarifying them. The team then prepared screen prototypes and business-logic flowcharts linking the modules.
The client anticipated hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players or users. The team optimised graphics and database design with performance and user experience in mind.
Implementation
Search, game interaction and real-time communication
To support a flexible and engaging experience, the team analysed search algorithms, refined its strategy and simulated a web-game environment with virtual players for testing. AJAX was used to improve user experience.
The social features included an instant-messaging-style tool displaying a user's friends list and predefined buttons, as well as detailed search.
Shinetech recommended server push rather than the client's original polling approach to make communication more immediate.
The documented environment included Windows Server 2003, Windows XP SP2, IIS 6.0 and SQL Server 2005. Development used C#, VB.NET, HTML, JavaScript, PHP and Flash ActionScript, with Visual Studio 2005, Photoshop CS3 and UltraEdit.
Project benefits
An extensible website on the required CMS
The project delivered an extensible, scalable website on DotNetNuke. Agile development and deployment supported quick delivery and efficiency, while development costs were reduced.
The resulting site brought educational games and social features into the client's required CMS structure.