View the main Projects and Competencies page
Rainy Day Builder was created for the course ISLT9486 – Advanced Designing Games for Learning at the University of Missouri. The game was designed for 3rd – 5th grade science students learning the water cycle and green roof technology. The game was created using the gDevelop game engine. The game teaches students about the materials and layers required to build a green roof as well as the tradeoffs that come with each material selection.
Goals
Goal 2: To provide students with experiences to develop skills in data collection, analysis and evaluation for reflecting on and applying to the design/development of learning opportunities and systems.
- Objective 2.1: Students are able to conduct analysis in order to translate and use theoretical frameworks and existing research to design/develop learning opportunities and systems.
- Objective 2.2: Students are able to manage and optimize analytics collected by learning and performance systems to develop criteria to measure learning impact and talent development.
- Competencies: Front-End Analysis and System Evaluation – (student) I developed critical and analytical skills for data collection and evaluation and can reflect and apply these skills to assess and evaluate learning systems.
Rainy Day Builder was a fantastic project to hone skills around analysis. For this project, a team of other students and myself conducted an iterative design cycle to implement learning frameworks like creating Mager-style objectives that include the level of Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. Within this iterative cycle we were also given the opportunity to gather feedback from multiple sources and incrementally improve our idea and eventually our game prototype. We conducted a set of interviews and conducted brief qualitative analysis on the idea of the prototype in the design phase. Along with this, we received feedback from the professor and from other members on the team and were able to analyze and implement changes based on the feedback.
Process
This project was broken down into four sections: learning assessment planning, concept testing, storyboarding, and prototyping. As a group, we determined our learning assessment plan for the game based off of the feedback from the real-life client: Dr. Laura Cole at the University of Colorado. Dr. Cole had previously conducted research and worked with teachers to implement a green roof and water cycle component into the curriculum at a handful of schools, but teachers mentioned that the green roof building project was quite taxing to provide to students. Given that, we came up with a learning assessment plan that focused on learning objectives around green roof design. We then conducted a concept test to get incremental feedback while still in the game design process. After getting the feedback, we were able to implement right away in our slight modifications to the idea as we created a storyboard. Lastly, we created the learning game prototype using CC0 licensed assets and the game engine gDevelop.
- Blake Pieper – Lead Developer
- Mustafa A – Designer
- Rebekah S – Designer / Researcher
- Jared H – Researcher
Reflection
I am overall fairly pleased at how this game prototype turned out. It consists of 10 levels that scaffold in complexity and difficulty as players choose materials and simulate building a green roof with the effects of precipitation based on the selected materials. The game scales nicely in difficulty and has a gentle ease-in to the concepts with the two tutorial levels. I was unable to implement a grid-system that allowed for different materials to be placed on the same roof, however, and that could add a great deal of depth and engaging gameplay to the prototype. Along with wanting more time to develop the game, I regret not spending more time gathering feedback on the game. While the feedback gathered after each phase was phenomenal, it made me realize how valuable the iterative loop of feedback and adjustment truly is to a development project.