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
Based on the teaching goals, we created a gameplay loop using Jesse Schell’s Story Stack approach.
Player: student in a fictional high school.
Premise: Your friend is the secretary of the Student Government. She is currently facing a crisis about “#ChalkCampaign”.
Meowwer – Social media app used by students.
School policy – If an issue gains visibility in Meowwer, it is called a “Student Urgency”,
and it demands an official response.
Present: “#ChalkCampaign” has become a popular issue
Concept Art
The player’s friend – secretary of the student government (Acting President)
Meowwer – a fictional social media platform for the school
Tech
This week, we established that we could play our test builds on our target devices – Chromebooks. We created a build that had the most basic gameplay elements.
- Placeholder dialogues for the new narrative structure.
- Integrate the new dialogue into the Dialog Manager framework.
- Display the character dialogs and progress in the dialogue.
- Create the build.
- Distribute to playtesters and test functionality.
By performing these tasks, we ensured that our pipeline was up and running. We had initially assumed that we could just host our game on one of the *.io websites and share the link to our playtesters. However, school-issued Chromebooks actively block any website that is for playing games. So we resorted to hosting our builds on ETC-provided servers.
We wrapped up the week by spending time preparing for our halves presentation.