Each of the Design Assignments is setup to intentionally focus on a different kind of learning mechanism to help you get a sense for what kinds of game mechanics make sense for which kinds of learning you're trying to evoke. This second assignment will focus on an induction / refinement based learning goal and have you expand out the process from what you did previously to include knowledge elicitation and iteration, to prepare for doing a full process when you get to the final game.

Similar to last time your goal will be to generate 10 different digital game ideas as lo-fi prototypes, and playtest at least 2 of them, however you will start the process by doing an empirical cognitive task analysis with 2 "novices", and you will finish out the process by iterating on 1 of your prototypes and doing an additional playtest. At the end of this process we will want to see playable prototypes of both your first iteration and second iteration games as well as documentation of your process along the way. As with the previous assignment we are. We are interested in a fully-playable core game loop that works for this educational goal and audience, and don’t care much (at all) about how the materials look or level of polish.

As with the previous assignment everyone will design a game for the same instructional domain: Geometric Problem Solving with Circle Angle Theorems, for High School Seniors / Early College Students who self-identify as "not math people". This is a domain we have used in this class for several years and is not being provided by a client, however, goal is to focus on using Knowledge Elicitation to understand how novices struggle with the domain instead of consulting literature of experts.

Knowledge Elicitation: Geometric Problem Solving

This assignment will focus primarily on the practice of doing Knowledge Elicitation to discover issues that novices struggle with in a domain. To keep things focused, everyone will use a standard problem set and accompanying answer key that covers the Interior Angle, Exterior Angle, and Major-Minor Arc theorems. I've used this task for teaching Knowledge Elicitation for a few years now and it tends to work well with adult participants who have likely forgotten the topic. The problem set provides a few potential variations in the task that you might explore, such as providing different levels of scaffolding and reference material, however I recommend you use the entire packet as students in the past who have cut it short have missed on on observing interesting behavior.

Observing Problem Solving

In this assignment you will do a focused Knowledge Elicitation to uncover details of student thinking in a given task domain. Specifically, the goal is to identify and describe the knowledge, strategies, and skills that students need to solve problems, the misconceptions or shallow knowledge that may interfere with learning, any “hidden skills” that may make problems easier than expected, and the kinds of errors that novices typically make. You are asked to collect problem solving protocols from two novices, analyze their similarities and differences, and synthesize a model of novice problem solving in the target domain.

"Novice" Learners

For the purposes of this assignment we will use a flexible definition of novice. For example, in the geometry task it may be hard to find true novices easily but you can use people who may not have done geometry in a long time and are rusty. The focus of this assignment is more on the collection of problem solving protocols to inform design rather than emphasize a particular demographic of learners. Because of this the demographic suggestion of "High School Seniors / Early College Students who self-identify as 'not math people'" is intended to be a rough guideline for the kinds of convenience sample people that would likely serve as a good novices for this task. If, unexpectedly, one of your participants executes the task flawlessly, then that protocol will not count as a novice protocol and you will need to run an additional participant.

Note that outside of the in-class activity we did to demonstrate the cognitive task analysis process, you should avoid using your classmates as novices because you all have access to the same answer key materials. That being said, your classmates should still be OK to serve as playtesters.

Specific Prompt

Design an educational game that:

Teaches the Interior Angle, Exterior Angle, and Major-Minor Arc theorems informed by Knowledge Elicitation of "novices"
1. Your game must touch on these theorems, it may contain other geometry concepts if you observe them in your novices, but it should not center more prominently on other concepts from geometry
Would appeal to High School Seniors / Early College Students who self-identify as "not math people"

Steps

Collaboration

Individual work, as well as collaboration is permitted for this assignment. Everyone needs to turn in their own work, but in the submission comment collaborators must be listed. For all process portions, we expect a volume of work equal to the amount of collaboration, with the exception of prototyping. Collaboration can be done on some deliverables and not others.

For example, if two students collaborated, we would expect: 4 novice protocols, 20 ideas, more than 1 playable prototype, 1 or more iteration and 6 playtests.

Deliverables

Similar to Assignment 1, this project will be split into 2 deliverable check-ins. The first deliverable (Design Assignment 2A) will involve collecting and analyzing 2 "novice" protocols and brainstorming 10 game design ideas. The second deliverable (Design Assignment 2B) will be a report-out of the prototyping, playtesting, and iteration process of you 2 game ideas and 1 iteration.

Assignment 2A

The general expectation for format for each stage of this assignment is flexible. In comparison to Assignment 1, this assignment involves more writing so a typical document may make sense, though there are also a number of diagrams involved that might be better done as slides. Use whatever format makes sense to you but please submit everything as a single pdf, or a single google doc that links or embeds the other components. Please include the following:

Empirical CTA Participant Recruitment - Provide a description of the participant recruitment strategy along with the backgrounds of the individual participants. DO NOT USE PARTICIPANT'S REAL NAMES (~1 paragraph)
Empirical CTA Participant Strategy Notes (x2) - For each participant provide notes from the individual sessions. This does not need to be an annotated transcript and can be in any format that made sense for taking notes. If you don't know what format to use feel free to the following table as a guide: (2 sets of notes, 1 per participant)

Problem What was their answer? What was the strategy they used? What difficulties did they have? Additional Notes

Problem 1

Problem 2

...
Empirical CTA Unified Diagram - Provide a flow chart or concept map thoroughly covers the strategies used by and could be used as a general novice strategy to the task. This should be one chart describing a general strategy across the novices NOT than one for each problem in the problem set. (1 chart).
Empirical CTA Unified Description - Provide a written synthesis of the unified empirical CTA that describes the overall problem solving strategy novices use, digests the contents of the diagram, provides a summary of the common difficulties they faced, and suggests implications for game design. (~3-4 paragraphs).
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 or continuous Figma or Miro document. The only format requirement is that we can easily access it and identify distinct ideas. This list will be lightly graded for depth. For example, a pair of ideas like "X, then X but on a phone" would be considered shallow. You can (and probably should) 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

The goal for Assignment 2B is to present two playable, playtested games, a game loop diagram for each, and then an iteration and additional playtest of at least one of the prototypes. For this assignment we recommend you 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". Please include the following:

Description and Gameplay Loops of 2 Prototypes: Descriptions of each of your prototypes, and some discussion (~1-2 paragraphs) of your approach in making each of them. Include a diagram for each game's core gameplay loop.
2 Low-fi Playable Prototypes: Hand in playable versions of each prototype. This can be physical paper prototypes or low-fi digital interactive as long as they are playable (potentially with the help of a human "game master"). You could also include Video Recordings of how the game works to demonstrate your prototypes.
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 playtest - 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.
Description of Iteration: Describe what you chose to change in iteration and how you changed things.
Your iterated prototype: Provide a playable version of your prototype. If your iterated directly on one of your prior prototypes, clearly describe the changes from the original.
Notes from a playtest of the iteration: Describe the playtesting session. Be sure to include similar details as the individual playtests.
A 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?