We have somehow made a dramatic change this week, by that mean we are now focusing more on gamifying the training experience rather than the technical platform we are going to use. The reason why we shift our focus is mainly because we receive some new inputs from our client, they would like us to bring more game mechanics into the training experience. Beyond that, it would be good for them if we could have this experience be flexible and could be easily migrated to various platforms.
In order to satisfy these specific requirements, we spent most of our time brainstorming new ideas and built seven paper prototypes. Some of them are from our former ideas, such as augmented reality quick reference, and an LEGO-like assembling game. We continue to develop these ideas and tried to summarize pros and cons in these approaches, which are very important for our further progress since they are helping us to make a decision for different scenarios we are looking at.
Beyond those ideas, we got some brand new ideas, most of them are gamification approaches as mentioned above.
First, we are thinking an experience that is much like a hide and seeks game, where people need to figure where is their next target in a limited amount of time. We believe this kind of training would help people to be more familiar with the interface of the equipment. Also, it would be nice to help them move around in the space so that they could feel the sense of real space in a virtual environment.
Second, we developed a card game based mechanic to help people remember the sequence of the operations, which is one of the biggest challenges we are currently facing. Since a card game is a highly abstracted representation of the actual operation, we believe this would help to simplify the learning progress.
Last but not least, we are looking into how people learn a new language nowadays. We hope to bring scientific learning method from vocabulary test to help to reinforce the learning experience.
Eventually, we hope these ideas could be applied to different scenarios and platforms, though we are going focus on only one of them, one scenario and one specific platform. We are all looking forward to building something from them in the next week!