Baraza

Category: Gorillas | Date: Oct 06 2008 | By: baraza

When we launched Owen and Mzee a few years ago, Turtle Pond, our partner also set up a special website for children to participate, interact and play games as a companion site for the Owen and Mzee books. The site was hugely successful.

So it was natural that Turtle Pond has also created Miza.com as a companion website for the children’s book “Looking For Miza: The True Story of the Mountain Gorilla Family Who Rescued One of Their Own”, published by  Scholastic Corporation Turtle Pond Publications.

According to the write up about the makers of Miza.com here “The goal of the site is to provide an interactive, jungle-inspired environment featuring Miza, where children can learn more about Africa’s endangered mountain gorillas and encourage them to take an active role in helping to alleviate the animals’ plight. According to Matthew Kicinski, president of Artgig, “This was our first time working with ESI, who approached us because of our experience designing and building online games and interactive websites. Although we were tasked with building the entire Flash site based on design and direction provided by ESI, the real showcase for us is the Gorilla Mountain game.” “Gorilla Mountain was a lot of fun to build,” says Artgig Chief Engineer and Programmer Steven Grosmark. “ESI provided a base set of requirements, but we were able to run with it and create something that reflects Artgig’s approach to Flash gaming that I think kids will really enjoy.”

In addition to the Gorilla Mountain game, Miza.com includes an interactive video maker where kids can create audio/video mash-ups of their favorite wildlife clips, Gorilla Finder - a first person narrated slideshow from the rangers’ perspective, sing-alongs, videos, animated shorts, a Nose Matcher game, and Jungle Jammer - a place where kids can create their own songs by adding animated animals to several jungle scenes.

“This was the perfect project for us,” said Matthew Kicinski. “Not only did we have the opportunity to do what we do best, which is create full-featured, interactive websites, but Miza.com is also a great cause, which is a big bonus as far as we’re concerned.”

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