Explain Everything: Chess on the Moon!

I created a playable chess board project file in Explain Everything. Hiding it on the Moon was probably an unnecessary step, but as I was already using these graphics in preparation for a tutorial series we are doing with Book Creator (see my first guest post here), I could not resist.

The chess pieces themselves came from OpenClipart.org from a user named akiross. I downloaded each image and saved them in a folder in Dropbox. I also created the board in Adobe Fireworks though I easily could have made it with shapes in Explain Everything. It could be a fun activity to have kids design their own chess board and pieces (or any other familiar turn-based board game) and then record themselves playing it.

Each piece has both the rotation and scale locked to avoid accidental scaling or rotation. The board is also locked in place (along with the Moon and Earth). I also used the Zoom tool in the beginning of the video - first to center the moon (double tap a location to 'smooth pan' when at original zoom level). The second (slightly botched) use was after zooming in I tried to smooth pan but forgot that I was not at the original zoom level, so the double tap actually zoomed me all the way back out. Oops!

So try to play a game of real-time chess, or perhaps create your own board! I'd love to see someone make an Explain Everything version of Risk (insert a browser with a rolling dice web-app maybe?)!