Week 10 was a big week for Team Joule: we updated the ETC faculty and our fellow students in our halves presentation and we tested all the changes we’ve been working on since Week 8.
If you’re interested in watching our presentation, you can see it here:
We got some feedback about ways to take this project even further than we had planned, and generally the faculty seems to think we’re creating a strong product, which is great to hear!
But of course we’re not making this for the ETC faculty; we’re making it for the 7th graders at Elizabeth Forward, so it was time to get their input as well!
After the presentation on Monday, we spent Tuesday fixing up a few items, including adding a thermostat, shower timer, confirmation UI, and implementing all the model changes and thumbnails for upgrades, and we tested on Wednesday.
As a reminder, the core problems we attempted to address were the following:
- -Comparisons between items were difficult.
- -The game was a bit overwhelming at first, leading us to believe navigation was unintuitive.
- -Students stopped working together as a team when we introduced 3 screens.
We were really happy with the results of the changes. We heard much clearer discussion and comparisons—it seemed that students had a much better grasp of how the different choices would impact them. We also saw for the first time that they treated comfort as something they could gain and spend (or sacrifice), which was great to see. In our first group, the students really worked together as a team, but in the other, though the discussion was still much better & less confused than the test three weeks ago, one player really dominated.
We did notice that comfort was still too prominent in the game and that students didn’t even click on habit cards with negative comfort changes. Because of our recent UI changes, those cards now have red angry faces on them, which we now realize is a mistake. They also wanted to make yellow neutral face happier, so we’re going to shift the comfort scale a bit so that there’s a bigger range that the students are comfortable with.
All that being said, our post-game survey revealed that, if they played again, group 1 would have put less emphasis on happiness/done something with the car and group 2 would have been more thoughtful about priorities & used more habit changes. We are very happy to hear this — they’re learning!
We spent the rest of the week planning our changes for ETC Playtest Day, which is coming at the end of Week 11. We hope to have most of the game onboarding process & educational events actually integrated into the digital experience.