Pinball comes from the BBC and takes you on a ‘journey’ around different sections of a pinball table, helping you create and refine ideas as you go.

It’s a different idea for a site, and one you’ll either love or hate immediately. However, there is a Help section, you’re encouraged to dive straight in and use the freeform tools in whatever way you see fit.

The four sections of the site all give you different ways of working through the creative process. Dot Dash allows you to quickly and easily build a Mind Map complete with images and customisable colours while Wild Reels mixes up different combinations of text and images to create new combinations. Most instantly enjoyable is Snap Shot, which allows you to quickly and easily manipulate images by drawing on them, rotating and scaling them and more.

What’s particularly useful is that anything you create in one of the site’s sections can be sent to another for further manipulation. Anything you want to save for future use can be exported as a JPG image file or printed for offline use.

Applications for the classroom:

This is really handy for those students who are full of ideas but lack direction in finding a starting point.

All six of the tools in the Pinball suite could be very useful for students. The three that stand out the most to are Dot Dash, Wild Reels, and Live Wire.

These would be ideal as they are fun, game based and create a clear starting point of getting an idea to fruition as a tangible product.