Instructional Goals and Design

The main instructional objective of Nature Explorer (NE) is to provide some type of scaffolding for the young visitors of the Price House Nature Center to facilitate their learning in this informal education setting. This has been accommodated with the design of a scavenger hunt game incorporating an open-ended learning environment which leverages the physical space and the knowledge already existing in that space. The learners become explorers who have to seek the space of the museum and discover the items described by the clues that the game is giving them. Nature Explorer is designed in such a way to provide the information in the form of a narrative through a role playing game. The engagement evoked by the game and the playfulness of the content, are the main factors that justify the chosen design for the instructional objectives on this informal, free-choice learning setting.

Instructional Approach

As was mentioned in a previous post, Nature Explorer is trying to address all four phases of instructional design in the following ways:

• Present information: information is presented in three modalities (i.e., as images, text and audio) to accommodate for the diverse needs of the audience (children between 4 to 10 years old), either through hints or extra info (trivia) about the item/animal being requested by the system
• Guide the learner: different levels of hints are provided to guide the visitor/player as of which artifact in the museum the assignment refers to; habitat information is presented to help the player set his mind on a specific environment (the museum is divided in similar natural settings)
• Practice: speed is not desired for this relaxed type of informal learning; two different levels (intentionally not connected with age) and ability to play again with a random set of items might elicit retention and fluency, although this is not the focus of the system
• Assessment: although assessment cannot be ensured in such an informal environment, NE will provide a printout after the quest prompting visitors to fill in the missing information related to their accomplishments (things they have already learned)

Motivation

Since Nature Explorer is addressed to young children it is imperative that it is compelling to them. In order to cater for this need various techniques have been used to increase motivation and engagement. The following are the most important design decisions that were taken towards this direction:

• Provide a meaningful goal through story telling and role playing (fantasy)
• Assign the role of explorer to provide a context and identity
• Exploit physical space through assignments that demand exploration and discovery (curiosity)
• Enable collaborative game play through group avatar choice to encourage social play
• Provide performance feedback and score keeping (experience points)
• Vary the difficulty level to allow advancing through experience (challenge)
• Get report and make it public to increase sense of accomplishment
• Get a summary of your achievements (accomplishment)
• Involving the child emotionally in the story (achieved through the narrative)
• Include interesting audio and visual effects to enhance sensation

Overall, NE tries to harness all three constituents of the motivational theory according to Malone (1981) which appear with red italics in the list above: curiosity, challenge, and fantasy. Additionally, it is a major design consideration to make Nature Explorer a "cool" experience for the museum visitors; hence, I have tried to accommodate the four factors of the Wheel of Joy according to Holtzblatt (2011): identity, accomplishment, sociality, and sensation, noted with dark blue color in the list. The design elements used to satisfy both these approached will hopefully increase the motivational impact.

Additionally, the layout of the interface has followed some design guidelines to ensure that it is closer to children’s culture, and communicates information more effectively for these age group (4 to 10 years old). Some of the design decisions that support this claim by evoking emotions and increasing engagement are the following:

• Use of colorful cartoon imagery with matching hand-drawn interface elements (no straight, strict lines)
• Use of the golden proportion rule to divide the screen asymmetrically but meaningfully between the main content (text and images) and the map
• Use of a warm color palette as a means to both evoke emotions but also as a good match for a system related to nature (earth color tones)
• Use of a serif, decorative font with a playful character in a big enough size to be easily readable from a distance of 3-4 feet
• Use of animations and cross-fade transitions in a sequence from left to right and top to bottom to allow seamless processing of new information
• Use of narration for all textual content to accommodate for younger ages but also for groups where not everyone has equal access to the screen
• Use of motion tween and transition sound effects to provide aural feedback of visual changes
• Use of other sound effects and sound tracks in specific points to increase engagement and draw attention to things happening on screen (e.g., item appearing on the image)

These guidelines for effective information design were drawn by the book “White space is not your enemy” (Golombiski and Hagen, 2012) and my own multimedia developing experience.

Storyboarding

During storyboarding I have used some techniques of cinematography to communicate the scope of the system more effectively. This was quite appropriate in my design since it involves physical motion of the user and not just manipulation of a computer system. Thus, long shots have been used to represent the big picture of the system in the museum hall and the actions of the user in space. Close shots were mainly used to reveal actions of the system and interaction of the user with the interface. Close-ups were used to display details of the system, like the QR codes attached on museum artifacts. Finally, different perspectives were used to reveal a cinematographic approach of the user interacting with other people in space (e.g., last scene). For details see the full storyboard of the system.

Golombisky, K., & Hagen, R. (2010). White Space is Not Your Enemy: A Beginner's Guide to Communicating Visually through Graphic, Web and Multimedia Design. Focal Press.

Holtzblatt, K. (2011). What makes things cool?: intentional design for innovation. interactions, 18(6), 40-47.
Malone, Thomas W. (1981). Toward a Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 5(4), 333-369.
Greenberg, S., Carpendale, S., Marquardt, N., & Buxton, B. (2012). Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook: The Workbook. Morgan Kaufmann.