- What are the challenges a team faces when working on an educational game?
The challenge of creating an educational game as a team is the difficult task of creating a game that is both engaging in a sense of teaching the player something they might not be familiar with, while also maintaining a sense of entertainment, fun, and keeping players engaged throughout the game in solid execution of both mechanics and content.
- In the case study, team members vetoed each other’s game ideas, what were the scientists’, pedagogy expert’s, and designer’s issues?
The scientist focused on the game’s effectiveness in communicating accurate scientific content. Their main concern was that some of the game ideas might oversimplify or misrepresent the science, reducing the educational value of the game. However, the pedagogy expert was primarily concerned with how well the game would facilitate learning. Especially when it came to some game ideas, which would not effectively promote the desired learning outcomes or would fail to engage students in critical thinking and problem-solving. And the designer was concerned about the game’s playability and the overall user experience.
- What did the team learn from playtesting their prototypes?
Playtesting helped the team understand how well the game ideas were meeting both the educational requirements and the players’ engagement needs. It gave valuable feedback on whether the games were fun, engaging, and whether they hit the learning goals as intended.
- How does playtesting resolve conflicts among team members?
Playtesting provided the team with concrete data, such as how players reacted to different aspects of the game through the educational, engaging, and experience aspects of the game’s design. This feedback helped resolve conflicts by giving team members evidence on which to base their decisions, rather than relying solely on subjective opinions. It also gave each team member a sense of whether their contributions to the game were executed properly.
while we didn’t really have any conflicts, I feel like I could relate to this a little bit because of the game we created together last semester! it was so helpful to do playtests instead of us just praying and hoping the game would work and be fun
I agree! I enjoyed making the game with you! Though, I’d say our only conflict was getting up so early to cut cards…ugh, game design am I right!