In week 6, we decided the whole game design and prepared to get into details.
After the quarter walk-around, we had been focusing on solving the problem “Making the digitization of Elkonin box which really benefits students”. Since instructors had confusion of the digitization and were wondering digitization might reduce the influences the physical one had, we were trying to solve this problem in the game and interaction design. We made the decision that the game design on the Promethean Board will be the “flipping card” game, and we did the paper playtesting within the team. We were trying to make the education in phoneme learning process more joyful and interesting for kids.
We made the interaction design changes in the “Elkonin box”, the perspective changes will help both making the transition from the original physical Elkonin Box training and the building garden bonus. With the changing of perspectives, the game is improved with respect to variety and decreased distraction.
In terms of art style, we also reached consensus, which is magical garden theme. Students can build their own unique garden after they finish their Elkonin box exercise. This garden is actually showing the progress of their education. Teacher will see how students performed in the learning process. Student will also have more achievement since they have their garden to show to friends and family.
Following are what we have for the first prototype of the game on the Promethean Board
“Flipping Card” is a socially interactive game which will bring competency, however, it is on the other side adding fun and cooperation in the education process. After having discussion with clients, they were happy about the game idea and looking forward to the digital prototype of this game on the Promethean Board. When it came to the art side, we designed the key character in this game. The magical garden theme with even incredible lollipop, cupcakes will be applied in both “Elkonin box” and “Flipping card ” parts to keep it consistent.
By making the phone call to client, we helped them know our progress. Going through the overall game experience, they found it is appropriate to focusing on the phoneme decoding. Sharing with them the research we did on how physical Elkonin box cultivates the ability to recognize word, they totally agreed with putting emphasis on moving marbles which will enhance their memory of the word. On the contrary, The spelling part and the drawing part will be removed because of the bad user experience, and clients supported this decision.
Questions for clients are solved which will help our project be better iterated. Questions include:
First, How the marble should be in their imagination? They will choose the simple and clean marble which should have its original shape. Therefore, it will help students quickly know how to finish this training as they usually do. Since we have the thought of making the instance response for student to get feedback, we are designing making the marble with the jelly feeling, which will make the whole experience cute. Second, clients will offer us the word list and the method to determine phonemes. This will help us find the direction quickly. Last but not least, clients gave us suggestions and pushed us on finishing on the word chaining exercise(like cat – hat – hut – hug, students need to know which phoneme they need to replace and how the phoneme changes.)
This week was quite a hard week for us for making decisions, however, everything went well. All members contributed a lot.
Attached video was showing the in-group paper playtesting.