Week 11

We began some of our testing this week. On Tuesday, we met with Bruce's summer game design class. We had made paper sketches of our first five quests (which contain the educational content in our game) and ran through each of the quests with six of the kids in the class. We both think that we learned a lot from this process.

Before beginning, we asked each student if they had experience with programming, and if so, which languages. If they had worked with C or C++, we asked them if they had done anything with pointers before. Only one of the six students knew what pointers were, three of the other students had programming experience, and the remaining two did not have any experience with programming.

We read each student a couple paragraphs to set the scene of the quests. Then, we asked the student to "allocate memory" by placing coloured lanterns in rooms, where each colour represented a different type of variable. The students were expected to learn that different variables take different amounts of memory space. Next, each student was asked to place pointers to each piece of allocated memory. Each pointer had a colour that connected them to a variable type, and each pointer needed to point to a specific room (again, the rooms were of variable sizes, so a float pointer wouldn't be pointing to a room of "size" int). Once the students made a connection between the types, they found this task really easily. Finally, the students were asked to change a guest in the room with a new guest, then send a message to the old guest. After a little bit of consideration, each student realized that there was no way of getting at that old guest again (a variable who had been overwritten). We were very happy to see some of the information getting across through these analogies.

Throughout the testing, we asked the students multiple choice questions on the syntax of pointers. This wasn't too much of a problem for any of them.


After the testing we realized that some of our analogies were flawed. Over the next couple of days, we corrected the problems, and are now working on coding those quests to test on the remaining six students in the class.