Final Poster

Week 18

This final week has been very busy for both of us, as the fall semester classes have begun. We have gathered all the information necessary to begin work on our final poster, and have scheduled a meeting with Professor Gooch to discuss an outline.
We have also arrange to give a final presentation to the Graphics Group, here at UVic, to demo our final project.

Week 17

This week, we continued to make the necessary alterations to our game, in hopes of improving the flow of the educational content.
This experience has been a tremendous learning process for us both, as undergrads. We have had experience with the typical game design process, but we were unaware of the significant differences between the design of an educational game and the design of a game created for pure entertainment. At the beginning of this project, we had planned on following the same steps we took in designing our maze game. We used the same outline for a Game Design Document, and in addition to some background research, we iterated through roughly the same process as before. Part way through our project, we realized that the considerable amount of time we had spent on the game mechanics should have been spent on the educational content. We put too much emphasis on the entertaining aspect of this game, and not nearly enough on the educational part.
These difficulties we encountered forced us to revise our design process, and consider how we might alter this process to reflect, what we believe to be, a more productive practice for designing and educational game.

Week 16

The area that is in need of improvement, this week, is the text in our game. It proved to be quite difficult to integrate all the educational information necessary to fully comprehend the concept of pointers, without having the user read an extensive amount of text. At the beginning of this project, we were hoping to implement and entertaining and educational game that would 'trick' the player into learning about pointers. The way we chose to display the information is through conversations between the main character and the characters they encountered throughout the game. In using this method, we hoped to make it seem as though they were participating in an educated conversation, other than having the information simply handed to them. Even though this tactic seemed to be more engaging for the user, it was still quite obvious that the goal of this game was to educated, and not simply to entertain.

Unfortunately, we we're unable to attend the poster competition in Vancouver. However, Donna was able to attend the 35th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), held in Los Angeles, CA. She was exposed to several creative designs and implementations in areas such as animation, gaming, interactivity, art, science, education and research.

Week 15

This week we focused on testing, and alterations/improvements on our quests. We both tested the same version of the game, and provided each other with feedback on the alterations the other had made.
We continued to add to the Game Flow document, and made some changes to the dialog throughout the quests.
Both of us were also able to gather a fresh group of users to test the effectiveness of the education content of our game. This allowed us to get a fresh perspective on our work. The voluntary users come from several different backgrounds, ranging from experienced programmers, to students with little, or no programming experience. The bulk of these tests were done by observing the users as they attempted the individual quests, then discussing and taking notes on the effectiveness and difficulty level.

Testing our prototypes is one of the most important stages in this process. We will continue to test and make the necessary alterations in the following weeks. These tests are focusing on the educational content, intuitiveness, and flow of our game. When the result are satisfactory, we will then test the entertaining aspect of our project.