THE CLIENT
Science Curiosity is a personal project currently in story development. This is UX research exploration of serious game design for students- by students that focus the design on the student, not the teacher or subject matter. Unlike most educational games, it does the learning is incidental, and within the gameplay itself, in the opposite of quizzes or other worksheet-type interaction that is not integrated into the gameplay.
THE PROBLEM
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education
– Albert Einstein.
How to design for students who are failing science education, reawaken their curiosity, and instill agency that makes them see themselves as science learners?
In the US, 32% of 8th graders are failing science education.
NAEP 2019
School is failing its students
Student perspective: Science in school is boring.
Teacher perspective: How to get to those students who do not see themselves as science learners.
Industry perspective: STEM occupation groups are projected to grow 11,5% between 2019 and 2029 - 300% more than average. In Sweden, the shortage of talent in the tech industry is projected at 70 000 professionals by 2024.
USER RESEARCH
Researching Motivation, Curiosity, and Game Theory
Going back to what makes us tick, what drives us to want to know more is boiled down to motivation and curiosity. Game Theory relies on these simple “tricks” to get us addicted through “desirable difficulty”. The main takeaways from research I conducted can be summarized as follows:
1. Curiosity sparks motivation and both are drivers of agency (and well-being)
2. Desirable difficulty is what drives action. When a player feels confident that they are likely to succeed, they will take the risk to learn.
Surveys
Sixty children who are not “science learners” and 30 adult gamers were surveyed. This provided a starting point to determine their gaming preferences, what they learned from games, and what educational games, if any, they found most valuable.
Interviews
Interviewees: 6 adults and 9 girls, 13 boys , aged 11-14,
Testable: The testable was revised over three rounds based on user interaction. The idea was to introduce a real-life science problem: You are invited on a mission to investigate why starfish in the ocean are dying.
Photo by Geoff Trodd on UnsplashThe children would start by listening to three samples of game music corresponding to gaming preferences identified in the survey, followed by,
“What does this make you think of?
”Which one would you prefer (and why)?”
That led them to stage two were they watched a 30-second clip introducing the story in that corresponding genre. The questions, “Would you like to find out more?”, and
“What would you like to do next?” were repeated to prompt conversation and interatction.
Summary of testableIn the first iteration, navigation followed the video. The idea was to introduce starfish anatomy through navigation first, as most games have navigation tutorials. No one wanted to spend time on navigation, they just wanted to get down to business. Another change in the testable was the gameplay options were displayed in a random sequence, which allowed for revealing preferences and insights, for example, “I do not like to play the scary stuff”, or “Can we also kill the prey, or do we only have to run away from them?” Moving all the play options to one screen along with empty slots, and aksing “What would you like to do next ?” revealed more about overall gameplay and user behavior, and still allowed for insights on preferences.
What would you like to do next conversation starterFocus Groups
The interview was followed by a focus group (5 groups of 3-4 children) to facilitate discussion and draw further insight from the testable and survey. Questions like, What do you like about science? Should the game allow the breaking of laws of nature for the sake of gameplay? And why do you make those choices, and not those? The discussion opened up to gameplay, drawing on insight from the survey: favorite games vs educational games. Finally, some groups imagined and brainstormed the next chapter of how the game should be built.
I posed a design problem to the focus groups:
“How should the starship (starfish-ship navigation) be designed? According to science starfish have no brains, just like zombies they only posess a nervous system, relying on sensors to sense danger or prey. So there is no “central location of command”. How would I build the ship? We referred to anatomy images as they workshopped and discussed solutions.
19 children opted to follow the rules of science and stick to “IRL”, accepting the rules of the game, as one of them said, “this is a science game, we have to follow reality when discussing it with his disagreeing teammate.”
Mosts of the sketches focused on the navigation screen, “which is all that matters, not its location in the ship”. Some suggested having it in the sensors, at the extremities, and could “teleport” to the appropriate location to drive the navigation as needed.
Samples of student navigation solutions explored in focus groupsGaming preferences were wide and varied, but Minecraft won as the best educational game, followed by Prodigy. Many children liked the gameplay within Prodigy vs. the actual math worksheet, with some admitting to having played the game for years without actually doing much math.
The Legends of Zelda and Subnautica kept coming up as a great examples of how the game should be built.
Clear trends emerged, with most users preferring the action and adventure mode over the slow exploration.
All users were not interested in ‘learning how to navigate’ and wanted to just dive in, an opportunity I had devised to teach the anatomy of the starfish. They later elaborated that they usually skip tutorials, and want easy navigation pointers that get them started immediately, any navigation learning can happen as the game advances and new features are introduced.
Gaming preferences identified in music selection predicted interaction preferences. For example, children who preferred mellow music mostly wanted to look around, talk to animals, and explore. Children who preferred action music wanted to fight. They all wanted to solve the mystery and have more to do. Confirmation Bias?
Challenge
A big challenge that kept creeping up in my mind is Universal Design or design for all: In creating my learner personas I need to avoid the single-story bias, and how can I design for all, when I do not have access to all, will this design meet the need of children from all races and economic backgrounds?
How much of this is commonality of human experience and how much is cultural? If I am focusing on students who struggle with the science taught at schools, how can I draw upon their rich experiences? The cultural experience I am drawing upon is their rich ‘gaming culture’ that they are fluent and experts in will it be enough?
None of the students found the video clips disturbing, but many of the adults did. This raises questions of cultural significance, the adults were based in the US, and the children were based in Norway. More research would be required to determine if children in the US share the views of children in
The other challenge, the money-making type, concerns the transfer of learning and value for educators & schools: The premises of this build are similar to a serious game like Zelda, and nothing like traditional educational games.
Research shows the value of gaming on language development, but will it be possible to see a difference in school performance in science as a subject?
CONCLUSION
What I took back to the drawing board after this experience was:
Single storyline caters for action players only and does not allow for diverse player/ learner needs —> build a more open world.
Do not forget the lesson learned from Prodigy: learning by doing: learning to navigate/anatomy can happen while playing, it does not have to be explicitly taught.
To ensure teacher and school buy-in, I need to build in a pre and post-assessment to and design a quasi ‘control group’ to test the impact of the game on school performance.