This is the most frequently asked question we receive. We find that some school networks have not upgraded to the current version of the Flash Player. BeanArena was designed to run on the Flash 8 Player. Unfortunately, there is no version of the site that runs on older Flash Players. Some school networks have their computers configured so that end users are not able to install the Flash Player. We recommend that if you are interested in using BeanArena and find that you are in this situation, contact your school network administrator or help desk and request that they upgrade to the current version of the Flash Player.

At BeanArena, our goal is to utilize cutting edge technologies to provide the most engaging and feature rich experience for teachers and students. The challenge with designing a learning environment around this idea is that it requires that computers are capable of supporting it. When we initially designed BeanArena, we anticipated running into this scenario although it will be less prevalent as network administrators make routine upgrades. Future releases of BeanArena will continue to target the Flash 8 Player although we will not require a future Flash Player upgrade for quite some time. We evaluate each release of the Macromedia Flash Player for features which we feel are beneficial to web-based learning. If we decide that a future release of BeanArena will significantly benefit teachers if released with a new version of the Flash Player, we will communicate these findings to you well in advance. In addition, future releases of BeanArena which target newer versions of the Flash Player would also be backwards compatible so the upgrade would not be required.

Yes, BeanArena is supported on the Mac although the minimum requirements are Mac OS X with the FireFox 1.1 browser. This is the only configuration which is currently supported on BeanArena although you may find that older versions of the Mac operating system will work. The most important requirement is the FireFox browser. In the future, we plan on officially supporting other browsers on the Mac.

BeanArena is hosted on a web farm by ORCS Web in Charlotte, North Carolina. ORCS Web is known for hosting several popular sites for Microsoft. Some of the media assets for BeanArena are delivered from a CDN (Content Distribution Network) which provides high bandwidth locations across the globe so that you quickly receive content from the closest location to your incoming request.

Absolutely. In addition to nightly backups on site, all files are archived every month and stored offline. BeanArena is hosted on a load balanced web farm so there are actually four different machines available to take requests. This means that even if one of the servers failed, there would still be three other machines available to take requests.

Yes it is. You can send a request to support@beanarena.com to be put on the sunset plan for the end of the academic year. We are currently developing the functionality in BeanArena so that you can manually export all of your classroom data but we anticipate that this will not be available for the end of this school year. For everyone on the sunset plan, we will email you a .csv (comma-separated values) file which can be imported into many popular spreadsheet and data management applications. If you are currently on a year-round school schedule, please indicate so in your request along with the final day of the academic year.

We are currently developing custom interactive content for this section of the site. Examples of what we are developing include chemistry and biology labs, as well as math and physics simulations, with much more planned in the future.

Absolutely not! You will never be locked out of your account for exceeding your storage quota. BeanArena was developed to be a service to educators. As with any business, we need a way to generate revenue to stay operational. Teachers who use BeanArena to a significant degree are asked to upgrade to a 'Professional Account' to offset bandwidth and storage fees that we incur from use of the application. We do reserve the right to run audits if we feel it necessary but this would only include a brief communication to any affected users.

The reasoning behind this is not related to the actual disk space required to store your files, but rather related to the bandwidth required to deliver these files. Considering that teachers can typically teach hundreds of students during an academic year, the bandwidth costs can become quite significant. Although the cost of storage space has dropped considerably in the past few years, unfortunately the cost of bandwidth has not. Our goal is to make BeanArena as beneficial to teachers as we are able; as the costs associated with operating the site fall, we will offer more space.

Storage space associated with an account is only calculated from files associated with bandwidth. This includes graphics and data that are streamed to browsers to display lessons and assessments. Storage space is not calculated from any data which is stored in a database (i.e. student scores, announcements, etc.).

There are several reasons for this limit. We decided to implement upload restrictions on file size for any files that could potentially cause a bottleneck in bandwidth. This restriction is also in place to promote the use of web friendly graphics and media files for use in authoring lessons. We plan to increase the ceiling on the file size for uploads in a controlled manner but you can contact us at any time to request the integration of larger files.

'Next Generation' is a term we use to describe the technologies used to develop BeanArena. BeanArena can also be described as a 'Web 2.0' application which typically involves using interactive technologies like AJAX and Flash. This new style of development typically gives more control to the user that was not possible before these technologies were available. It is common for 'Web 2.0' applications to behave more like desktop software than static web pages.

We made a decision to make BeanArena available by invitation for two reasons. First, we were interested in helping K-12 educators so it was important to us that we made some attempt to control access to the site. Another reason for invitation-only access was to ensure controlled growth. This is a typical process that is used often when launching new services. Companies like Google and Microsoft will typically do this with any new service they launch.