Concluding Results

We have designed a poster to highlight the various results we achieved throughout this course, and to acknowledge the wonderful people who worked with us.


Goals and purpose of the project


The widespread appeal of games among children creates an opportunity for the delivery of educational content, and has the potential to supplement the effectiveness of traditional education. Educators often marvel at the time and energy which young people invest into playing video games. Because players often master complex situations provided in entertaining video games, it suggests that players are learning during the course of such game-play. Successful games are characterized by their ability to capture a player's attention for a long period of time, which suggests that such games are entertaining. In contrast, many educational games are considered boring, which can lead them to be ignored in favour of more "interesting" games. Our intentions for this project were to test an educational game design method that we had previously developed, to investigate the use of alternative user interfaces for the presentation of games, and to create one or more entertaining, educational games.


Generic software design models, such as the Waterfall Model or the Spiral Model, are typically useful in designing basic software. However, these models do not consider the specific requirements of educational games. In our previous work, we developed a methodology that we found to be more appropriate for educational game design. This methodology focuses primarily on the educational aspect of the game being developed, and demonstrated that the designer must be aware that changes to the game mechanics or implementation can impact the content of their game and potentially overshadow it. Our new method places a greater emphasis on the educational content and testing much earlier on in the process than the previous models. All changes in later steps of the method then return to the educational design step so that modifications which may have been detrimental to the purpose of the game will be caught quickly. We will use this opportunity of creating another educational game to test our model by guiding other students through it.


Traditionally, games are limited to single-player interfaces such as a keyboard and/or a mouse for computer games, or a control pad for a gaming system. It is very difficult to expand computer games to accept multiple players; typically, one computer is needed for each player. It is easier to implement multi-player games for gaming systems, but they usually have limits as to how many control pads can be connected at any one time. These interfaces can also impose a lower limit on user manual dexterity, and often have a learning curve for input controls; people with no prior exposure to video games are thus excluded from playing. The use of alternative user interfaces can decrease the exclusivity of traditional games, and increase the appeal of games to a wider audience, by making greater use of natural movements as control options. We were focused on the potential of touch tables, such as MERL's Diamond Touch and Microsoft's Surface, for multi-person interaction. However, we were still open to the possibility of other innovative solutions.


We planned to strategically design educational games that would be considered entertaining, so that the content itself would be engaging and appealing to the players. The games were intended to increase information retention by visitors to establishments such as museums or zoos, and to increase interest in return visits. We were motivated by the San Diego Zoo story "A World Without Frogs?" (http://www.sandiegozoo.org/help_wildlife/story_frogs.html), and decided that our games should convey information about the life cycles of various frog species, about how industrial growth is leading to the extinction of certain species, and about how these effects are exacerbated by pollutants and the introduction of non-indigenous species into previously stable environments.




Process used in completing the research
We developed a directed-studies course to allow us to work with other students in the department to develop our ideas. The students in the course explored many different areas: background research of educational games, tangible technology, and following a process for completing and testing the validity of an educational game. We met with the other students weekly and spent time discussing the various difficulties that faced the educational games industry by having the students play a variety of games that were intended to instruct their audience and analyze the results.

We then provided the students with the initial specifications that we had developed for our project and worked with them to create the outlines of four unique games. The students had the opportunity to choose which game they wanted to work on and came together to implement two of them. As we went through the process of designing the games by following our method, we discussed changes that may be relevant to future game designers. Each week the students had to present where they were with the method and what content they were focusing on. This allowed us to help guide them to consider the content first and the mechanics second. We created an exercise to get the other students to express their content wordlessly, so that they would consider different methods of communication. We were very happy that both groups decided to work with different technologies: the camera and projector system as well as the touch table.

We then began to investigate the various methods that we could use to test the games and finishing some of the stages that had been lacking by the groups -- for example, the touch table group had been unable to actually implement the game on that technology and had instead resorted to using XBox controllers.

We also spent more time discussing the changes to our design process. It has been modified from the original version that we had presented to the students, because although the original process had come from our experiences with designing a game, we had not yet had a chance to actually test it. We were very pleased with the changes -- it now looks like something developed from a more iterated process, initially we had kept most of the features of the waterfall method -- and the result of using it was two very impressive games that exceeded our expectations and met our criteria.


Conclusion of the report, including a description of the results achieved
We have explored the challenges of balancing technology and content in educational games to ensure that the final result is something compelling that also meets the initial expectations of the project. By including the new technologies we have something very different and very unique. We met the expected hurdle of focusing a group of students on the educational content they were developing when many desired to simply make something "cool".

We learned more about the educational design process and have had the opportunity to upgrade our designs. Our new outline is better equipped to handle the unpopular steps of background research and educational planning that our previous design was unable to do. We allow slightly more implementation than we had before which seems to whet the designers' appetite to get into the coding and simply return more to the design and testing stage instead of forcing all of it to happen at the beginning. We believe that this allows the designers to think about things as they are doing them, but it makes sure that if a conflict arises it is still captured early in a stage that it is easy to fix.

And finally, we have two absolutely amazing game deliverables that, although they need a little more tweaking before they can be platform independent, have completely satisfied our objectives in beginning this project.