Communicating Educational Game Design

Coordinating Tasks

Building educational games involves the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team consisting of the game designer(s), the graphic designer(s), the domain expert(s), and the pedagogy expert(s). For the purposes of the Nature Explorer I had to undertake some roles while also communicating design decisions with other members of the team to develop a final product that would be appropriate for the client but also effective for its learning objectives. This was no trivial task since different stakeholders have different priorities in designing an educational game; my main concern was to have a technologically perfect product that can withstand children use but also be entertaining to keep their interest, while other parties were more concerned of the content and its appropriateness for the target audience.

Although I did try to accommodate what I believed to be of interest to 10-year old kids, there was no way I could have done this as effectively as an educator. Also, finding the appropriate informative hints that would make sense to the knowledge level of potential young museum visitors was another task that I wanted to offload to someone considered a content expert. Unfortunately, the volunteered-based nature of the museum, acting as the client, had no resources at hand to provide this information promptly. Instead, they have assigned someone as a contact person to coordinate compiling the material (basically the text), also assuming it would be in the right tone and style. As far as I know, the "content experts" in this case were parents who were visiting the museum and often volunteered to help with its activities. This fact made it impossible to either have a timely response by everyone but also to get a consistent style in the content according to my guidelines.

As a consequence the client had to provide most of the content after realizing that the delegates were not as efficient as expected! Even in this case the content did not conform to the constraints and principles imposed by the game design. More specifically, some hints were too generic to provide any meaningful help to the players (e.g., I am a reptile). Also, the hints had to be of specific nature so that they could be easily sketched in a way that can communicate the illustrated message meaningfully (e.g., My young are called "kits"). Even more, a necessary constraint imposed by the required expandability of the system (i.e., the museum should be able to add more animals easily) the hints had to be the same between the two levels, which was not the case with most of the provided content. These conflicts necessitated my intervention in content-writing and a new cycle of edits and reviews by the museum person acting as domain expert.

At the same time this person was acting as the educator who had the capacity to format the content appropriately. She has also been giving some useful advice on the level of knowledge that kids are supposed to have at this age, which has also been affecting graphic design representation. As an example, I was instructed that the mountains should be more rounded instead of being pointy with snowed peaks, because this is how the Appalachian mountains are. Some other advice included the use of specific wording that was supposed to be keen to children; however, after further review and use of such wording in the prototype it was revealed that this was not such a common word in children's dictionary (e.g., 'tree cookie' to reveal a slice of tree trunk). Such incidents revealed the need to have a dedicated pedagogy expert who knows exactly the culture and cognitive abilities of the 4-10 years old children in the area.

Intercontinental Collaboration

During the decision and content negotiation process I had to work with the animator in order to produce some initial sketches for the prototype. Since he was located in Athens, Greece it was quite hard to coordinate our time schedule and work at the same time. Consequently, we had to arrange some online meetings where things were explained and clarified about graphic design needs. To avoid any miscommunication of intentions most of the content was drafted on the fly and had to be approved by me before proceeding to the final designs. His drawings were based on my guidelines both for the layout of the interface, but also as far as the habitats and hints specifics are concerned. For the former I had to setup an interface wireframe which he used as a guide to draw the sketches in the right proportions (see image below).

The wireframe used for sketching the interface elements.

The latter involved a much more complicated process, since more considerations had to be taken into account. Firstly, the comments about specific characteristics of the habitats had to be accommodated by the designer (e.g., comments like the one about the mountains' shape mentioned above). Also, it was necessary that the attributes of each habitat were drawn in such a way that there was adequate space to place the animal within context (e.g., have the squirrel appear on a tree branch). Another equally important concern was to draw the environment in such a perspective that all animals would appear in a natural size and still preserve the habitat's characteristics. This proved very challenging especially for the 'underground' where animals had to appear in holes and caves, while also maintaining a view of the surroundings. The following figure provides a draft which was a result of many previous attempts to tackle the problem; the skunk's home appears as transparent while the fox' cave has an outwards view.

The 'underground' habitat which hosts the fox and the skunk.

Secondly, animals had to be accurately designed without sacrificing their playful and cartoon character; this demanded thorough research about the animal and its more prominent characteristics which were also described in the hints. What was even harder was to draw specific hints that could be meaningful in guiding players to visually comprehend the hint, without giving away the actual animal. To avoid such incidents, I had to come up with an initial list describing the hint visualization that was then reviewed and negotiated with the animator. An excerpt from the table provided to the animator is displayed below for the owl and the skunk. The resulting sketch drafts, that represent those hints after our discussions, are shown in the following image.

Owl	I am bird living at night.	I like to eat insects and mice.	I have a wide face and really big eyes.	I am a wise bird!
	night sky (already have it)	a plate with a mouse and a fly	a wide female face with big eyes	a pile of books
Skunk	I have stripes in my fur.	I eat bugs, mice, birds, eggs, berries, and nuts.	I can spray liquid to blind my predators.	I use my smell to scare others away.
	a fur (coat) with B&W stripes	a plate with a mouse, eggs, and nuts	a spray in a dog's face	a really bad smell and someone with a disgusted face

Overall, the coordination of the different parties was a laborious and time consuming task that demanded timely coordination of content creation and provision. Unfortunately, time constraints did not allow a second playtesting for evaluating the effectiveness of these negotiated outcomes of educational game design in communicating the message to players[1]. However, we hope that the outcome will pay off by engaging the children in a fun and engaging exploration of the Nature Center!

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[1] Winn & Heeter (2006). Resolving conflicts in educational game design through playtesting. Innovate 3(2).