Hello, welcome to Team Joule’s third week update!
In this week, we built our first card board prototype and ran several playtesting with ETC students, faculty and EF students.
Monday, we decided our first prototype plan and started to build it. We developed our game based on these learning goals.
- Identify energy consumption areas in the house
- Learn about different energy consuming appliances
- Learn about energy consuming habits
- Understand that energy is difficult to generate by experiencing the chore of energy generation
Our first step is to figure out different energy consuming appliances in our house. We did research on every appliances, and record costs and wattage uses.
Tuesday, we analyzed data we collected from Monday, and started to prototype our first card board version game. There are several rooms in our card board house, and each room has different appliances. Upgrade and habits changes can be made to each appliances.
Our prototype game focuses on finding ways to reduce energy consumption in the house through upgrading appliances or changing habit and finding best way to spend money to save money. The game has five round, and each round the player can made two habit changes and upgrade as many as appliances they can. The player will be given $500 at the beginning, and in next round they will be given the money they saved in the first round. Each round is a year, and after five rounds(five years), we will calculate the amount of money they saved. A number of how much energy they save in 15 years will show at the end of the game.
On Wednesday, we ran three playtesting with our ETC students. We eliminate the crank since it doesn’t work very well. But our prototype crank is pretty cool.
On Thursday, we ran more playtesting with some ETC faculty and got feedback. We spent the rest of the day modifying our prototype and prepare for playtesting with EF students on Friday.
On Friday, we took our card board prototype to EFMS, and ran 6 playtesting with students there. We gave them pre-test and post-test to see what they have learned from the game.
The playtesting is pretty good. Students at EF seem to enjoy the game, and we have learnt what they are thinking about energy, conservation and habit changes. They also raised questions for our games, and gave our a lot of feedback. They are looking forward to try our real game!