2024-01-29 Educators WG: Game Design

Owned by John Swope
Last updated: Jul 11, 2024
3 min read

Recording Links:

Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x0_618eizJLOG7wq9sK76tlLbt1mxj_o/view?usp=sharing

Transcript: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r5c03YD7Z9NHjbOLV5EpK-hVkGVsEaN7/view?usp=sharing

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cUCsYW1NT1vWcnlINHXY3xRiCOnm3YUp0OZ7s3tsL_I/edit#slide=id.p

Minutes:

00:05 - 00:09: Welcome and Introduction

00:12 - 03:44 Documentation Update

  • Migration of documents

  • People might be

    • Volunteering for different sections

    • Setting up a course

    • Adding exercise and tools

  • Challenge: Moving contents over - fixing the links (both internal and external)

03:49 - 32:27 Designing Games to the Learning Objectives and Getting Them Built

  1. What are the core tenets of good game design?

    1. Intrinsic motivation

    2. Extrinsic motivation

  2. How are educational games different? How are they the same?

    1. You cannot have a good game of educational robots without embracing the fact that to challenge learners they have to fail to be motivated which is very different from your standard educational exercise.

    2. When you design an activity. The idea isn't like how we're going to make them fail here until they get it right. It's you want them to complete it and see what they've learned most of the time.

    3. With games, if there's not enough of a challenge, the game is not fun, and players will stop playing. But certainly, if there's too much of a challenge, the players will give up and stop playing. So you have to strike that balance between kind of challenge and success. This is by concept called gameplay loop - a fundamental way that you can break down a game and continually motivate players.

  3. How do we build games that meet our learning objectives? And when do we choose games over other mediums?

    1. Keep learning objectives relatively simple to accomplish when building your games, and keep gameplay fun and intuitive.

    2. Decrease the on-ramp, and how much people need to engage with them to succeed.

    3. Keep it elegant, the fewer moving parts, the better.

32:28 - 51:06 Q&A

  1. What is the process of working with the developers? - John Swope

    1. An interactive library

    2. The game engine was built in such a way that anyone could build games using UI tools, but it was all done through simple xml editing

    3. The developer mostly built the skeleton and then adapted it to the game. I (Matthew) was the one who made the final touch

  2. Were there plans to build this into different games that ever happened for open learning? - John Swope

    1. A bunch of faculties immediately latched onto it and tried to include it in their courses. I just don't know if they got approval to do that.

  3. What about your experiences of connecting learning outcomes or objectives, or maybe potentially assessments to the stories within the games, or what you would recommend, or best practices, and working with faculty or subject matter experts and how to? I'm not necessarily convinced that a game is a good way to go. But how do you make sure? And how are you checking that those learning objectives are being met?- Shannon Rushe

    1. When it comes to a story, simple is better.

    2. Learners do have plenty of extrinsic motivation. and you can build intrinsic motivation through good gameplay design. You don't necessarily need to throw a story in there to muddle things up unless it's necessary.

    3. There may be an instance where a game is not the right way to talk about the subject.

  4. Do you have insights on where the game transfer would be when something that you can do as a learning activity that incorporates hands-on things would make a good game? -Julie Mullen

    1. Something is fun as a hands-on activity it will be fun as a video game. The only problem is you'll probably have to come up with a computer to play, that is by far the hardest part of building anything like that. Teaching computers to play your game is a challenge because one of 2 things will happen if you can train it to make completely random decisions which will make it no challenge whatsoever to play against which is the Dom computer.

  5. Developer process times and costs? - Joanna

    1. The more simple and more elegant your game is, the less time it's going to take.

39:27 - 40:11 The process of getting the game developed as a semi-technical learning designer.

  1. Game maker studio. It can output HTML. 5. It's not particularly good. HTML. 5. It's not particularly good code, but you can use it for prototyping.

51:25 - 53:29 Other business / Open Agenda

  • Next session - February 12, 2024

  • Next session’s speaker - Rebecca from Penn State extension