Wrap-up As we plan to wrap up the project, and the semester we conducted one final playtest with South Fayette Middle School. This was an asynchronous playtest where the students played through our game without us being present. We wanted to observe whether they were motivated to play and complete the game without supervision. We […]
Updates The soft opening brought us much feedback. But the volume of feedback was a bit more than what can be iterated upon. So we had to choose which ones we would incorporate. This week, we also conducted our final live-over-zoom playtest with Laurel Highlands Middle School. This time, it was with 6th-grade students. Our […]
Updates This week, we ran our biggest playtest. We playtested with 2 schools, South Fayette Middle School and Laurel Highlands Middle School. We had students from the 7th and 8th grades. The highlights of the playtest are: The social media post interface is still a bit unclear to most of our playtesters. There is a […]
Updates This week, we focused on improving our build based on the feedback we received from our playtests. We made several changes to the interface and streamlined the user experience. Design On the design side, we added several sections to the tutorial. Dragging tutorial to show hallway scrolling Refined the tutorial flow by adding more […]
Updates We successfully completed our first major playtest with 8th-grade students from South Fayette Middle School, Pittsburgh. Four students played our game which included the first chapter of the story. Additionally, we had another 3 players test our game over the weekend. Our takeaways from the playtest were: Some players found the characters and dialogue […]
Updates We spent this week working towards a build for our first formal playtest. We also connected with WQED Pittsburgh to help us with our playtesting. WQED is running a program where they are reaching out to several schools in Pittsburgh to get them involved in the development community and put them in touch with […]
After our first playtest of the prototype, and consulting with our SME, we received feedback that the topic of controversy that we chose (ban chalk) was not very relatable to middle school students. So we picked a different topic – Deep fried chicken. Aside from that, we finally received responses to our initial audience research […]
This week was our halfway milestone. Along with presenting our progress thus far, we spent the week solidifying our design and paper prototyping our gameplay loop. We also created a short demo video of our prototype to explain the flow of the game. And lastly, we were put in touch with a dedicated writer who […]
Design This week, we refined our teaching goals for teaching Credibility Checking. We realized that we cannot quantifiably teach and assess transformation for Relevance and Purpose from the CRAAP test. We decided that these would be better delivered through the narrative. Our updated framework to teach Credibility Checking is shown in the drawing below. Gameplay […]
Week 5 is when we finally found our direction. Until this point, our understanding of the problem space was on a very high level. While it was a noble cause to try and teach as much as we could to our young audience, the fact of the matter was that we could not encompass every […]