As part of my Masters in Entertainment Technology I am working on an educational game project at The Entertainment Technology Center. My team aims to essentially create a living 360 degree angle system for fourth to six graders to interact with whilst solving puzzles. We hope that through our demographics interaction with this system we will:
- Clarify misconceptions about the system
- Build a familiarity with the system through puzzles which require students to use estimation
In approaching this problem we have gone through an extensive ideation process, and the result is that we finally nailed down a core mechanic that makes considering angles essential. The following is a prototype of what we came up with:
Currently in our project we are at a point where we have to create the puzzles that will make up the heart of our educational game. To do this properly requires the creation of an interest curve; but not just any interest curve! As well needing to be an entertaining experience we must go one step further, and include the element of educational value.
Design Process
With the objective of gamifying the material that our client uses to teach their students we began designing an interest curve. The first part of this process is to study the material which took the form of common core sheets.
We looked at each of the sheets, and broke down the different tasks involved which were as follows:
- Create an angle using a protractor
- Obtuse, acute, right, and straight problems
- Visual identification of obtuse, acute, right, and straight
- Identification of obtuse, acute, right within different shapes
- Given a protractor diagram identify the angle
- Estimate an angle between two points
- Find the missing angle given a total angle
- Find supplementary angles
- Finding complementary angles
- Find missing angles in a cross shaped
- Find angles in portions of a circle
- Find the angles in a triangle
Next with these tasks we looked at what tasks were best suited to the game we have created which was 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12.
In parallel we created a number of game elements to help us create these problems:
- Clockwise Gem
- Anticlockwise Gem
- Beam Generator
- Power Gem
- Receivers & Obstacles
We then identified what is essentially our core gameplay challenges that our player will face:
- Dragging angle gems into beam generator/receivers
- Remove angle gems from beam generator/receivers
- Value deciesions between angle gems
- Clockwise angle gem addition problems
- Anticlockwise angle gem addition problems
Given our design and students curriculum, we made some assumptions about these challenges:
- We consider clockwise movement a more advanced topic
- Increasing complexity means increasing challenge, which can be achieved with more mirrors, angle gem slots, and receivers with obstacles
Now with these elements we imagined an interest curve.