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Prototyping and Playtesting Asssignment Requirements

The focus of this assignment will be on the practical skills of ideation, prototyping and playtesting and to get your feet wet doing actual game design. Your goal will be to generate 10 different game ideas, prototype and playtest at least 2 of them and iterate on at least 1 of those 2. There is not expectation that you ultimately arrive at a finished game (or even a good game) at the end of this process, we expect the end results to be sketchy prototypes. We are more interested in the first few steps of the journey.

You have two options with respect to the learning objectives for which to design your game. You could either create a game that helps students better understand second-order concepts in the discipline of history, or a game that follows up on your work for Assignment 1. If you decide to do the latter, you can (and should) build on the Knowledge Elicitation you did for Assignment 1. In other words, you should stay in the same domain. If you opt to build a game for learning about history, you will skip the Knowledge Elicitation phase and jump straight into game design.

Instructional Domain 1: The Practice of History

To keep things coherent we are asking everyone to design a game for the same instructional domain: History. History is commonly thought of as a neatly ordered collection of facts, however, this is only the content of history. When history is looked at as a discipline it becomes much broader.

"Historians talk and write about things that go on in the world. Their histories are full of pioneers, politicians, and preachers, or of battles, bureaucracies, and banks. They give their readers explanations, they use evidence, and they write accounts, but their books are not about the idea of explanation, or the notion of evidence, or what kind of thing a historical account is. Rather, they use their own (usually sophisticated) understandings of evidence or explanation to write books about Columbus or the Maya or the American Revolution. Nevertheless, concepts such as evidence lie at the heart of history as a discipline. They shape our understanding of what it is to “do” history and allow us to organize our content knowledge

...

The point of learning history is that students can make sense of the past, and doing so means knowing some historical content. But understanding the discipline allows more serious engagement with the substantive history students study and enables them to do things with their historical knowledge." (Lee, 2005).

More specifically, we are asking your to design a game based on the content of a chapter in the National Research Council report How Student Learn Links to an external site., called Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding History, which advocates for expanding notions of history to help K-12 students better understand what it is for. Your goal is to design a game around one of the second-order concepts introduced in the chapter (starting on page 11 of the pdf): Time , Change , Empathy , Cause , Evidence , or Accounts . Each one is described in detail and comes with a few examples. You do not necessarily need to read the entire Understanding History chapter but the context may be helpful for understanding these second-order concepts. For this assignment you only need to focus on one concept but you could consider more than one if you wanted. Beyond the second-order concepts you choose there is no expectation for any particular time period of history. You might even consider designs across time periods, or exploring the practice of history in a fictional setting.

Instructional Domain 2: Building on Assignment 1

If you decide to build a game for the task domain you chose for Assignment 1, we ask that your game covers the main problem types that you focused on during Assignment 1. Other than that, there are no restrictions on the educational objectives of the game. If you want to do this option please let us know so we can prioritize turning around feedback on your Knowledge Elicitation assignment.

Steps

  1. Decide on concrete educational objectives - whether you will create a history game, or a game for your task domain of Assignment 1. If you decide to build a history game read up on the different second-order concepts presented in the Download Understanding History

    chapter. If you decide to build on Assignment 1 review your CTA results and decide on a specific set of educational objectives.

  2. Brainstorm design ideas - Consider MDA, instructional principles that were discussed in class, and the concept of integration. You might also consult several of the tips we talked about in class.
  3. Create prototypes - To avoid design fixation we ask that you prototype and playtest at least 2 of your ideas. These should be low fidelity, physical, or paper prototypes that allow you to test out an idea.

  4. Playtest your prototypes - Find a group of playtesters and try out your prototypes. Be sure to take notes on who your playtesters were, whether or not you played with them, how long the session took, and any feedback you got during or after the test.

  5. Iterate on your feedback - Once you have some feedback from playtesting your prototypes consider how you might change your ideas and pick one to iterate
  6. Playtest the iteration - Do another playtest of the iterated prototype. Again, be sure to take notes on who your playtesters were and how the session went.

Deliverables

Similar to Assignment 1 the deliverables for this assignment are broken into three stages to scaffold a timeline. The first deliverable (Assignment 2A) will involve writing up your concrete educational goals and brainstorming 10 design ideas. The second deliverable (Assignment 2B) will involve creating prototypes of two of your ideas and playtesting them with others. The final deliverable (Assignment 2C) will involve taking the feedback from your playtesting, iterating on one of your design ideas, and playtesting the iteration.

The general expectation for format for each stage of this assignment is flexible. There are many different formats for brainstorming and prototyping, especially given the remote format. Each deliverable has a suggested format but if you want to use some other platform or tool just reach out ahead of time.

Assignment 2A

For Assignment 2A please turn in a slide deck (using PowerPoint or Google Slides) that includes the following:

  1. A slide describing your concrete educational goals: A short (~1 paragraph) description of the specific educational goal you decided to focus on.
  2. A slide describing your brainstorming process: A brief description of your general strategy to brainstorming. This could be as simple as a brief paragraph of how you thought about the task. You might also include any interesting insights you had along the way.
  3. One slide for each of your (at least) 10 game ideas: Individual ideas can be structured using whichever format is appropriate for how you approach the process. The could be anything from a short paragraph, or bulleted list, to a hand drawn sketch. This list will be lightly graded for depth. For example, an idea of the form "X but on a phone" would be considered shallow. You can have these kinds of ideas in the process but we are looking for at least 10 that have some real substance to them.

Assignment 2B

For Assignment 2B please turn in a single document with your descriptions and notes. If you have prototypes or other materials in different places you can link out to them from the doc itself. Please be sure any relevant sharing settings are set to "anyone with link".

  1. Your 2 prototypes: Descriptions of each of your prototypes, ideally with pictures, and some discussion (~1-2 paragraphs) of your approach in making each of them. You could also link to external sites if you use some kind of digital prototyping platform.
  2. Notes from your Playtesting sessions: Describe each of your playtesting sessions. Be sure to include:
    1. Who your playtesters were and any relevant background knowledge they might have had about your learning goal
    2. How you conducted the play test - include things like: What question were you trying to answer? Did you participate? How did you setup your prototype?
    3. How the session went - We are not looking for a transcript, more like a narrative account of what happened. Include things like: Did it go smoothly? Were people confused by any aspect in particular? Did you have to ad lib something? Where there any surprises?
    4. A set of insights you got about the prototype in question and what you would change.

Assignment 2C

For Assignment 2C please turn in a single document with your descriptions and notes. If you have prototypes or other materials in different places you can link out to them from the doc itself. Please be sure any relevant sharing settings are set to "anyone with link".

  1. Your iterated prototype: Describe how you iterated one of your prototypes based on the feedback from playtesting.
  2. Notes from a playtest of the iteration: Describe the playtesting session. Be sure to include:
    1. Who your playtesters were and any relevant background knowledge they might have had about your learning goal
    2. How you conducted the play test - include things like: What question were you trying to answer? Did you participate? How did you setup your prototype?
    3. How the session went - We are not looking for a transcript, more like a narrative account of what happened. Include things like: Did it go smoothly? Were people confused by any aspect in particular? Did you have to ad lib something? Where there any surprises?
    4. A set of insights you got about the prototype in question and what you would change.
  3. Final reflection: Reflect on the overall process (~1 page). What would you have done differently? What was surprisingly hard or easy? What would be the next thing you would do if you were to continue the final prototype you have?

Questions

If you have any questions about the requirements or expectations of this assignment you can ask them in the FAQ discussion.