Design Evolution
Dec 8th, 2011 by goodec2
The Schoolhouse of Pop design team established several hypotheses and goals during the creation of the educational game. Some of the initial hypotheses were falsified through more research and interaction with the study group as additional ideas were generated. The following is a list of hypotheses established during the design process followed by the associated challenges.
Students can learn better in groups: Students often worked individually in the teams and did not look to the team for initial help.
Students are capable of analyzing word as it appears in a song: The students often took over ten seconds to analyze a word, and needed more hints in order to get correct answers.
Students are motivated by competition: Very few of the students were actually interested in competing, but were content with helping one another or simply spectating.
The Schoolhouse of Pop game also went through several design iterations.
- PowerPoint lyric display coupled with a game board response device. This version was only focused on teaching nouns, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and adjectives.
- Adobe Flash game with freedom to test any word type and additional English lessons.
- Adobe Flash game with different difficulty levels and easy navigation between levels.
For details into the hypotheses creation process and design iterations, please see the written ethnographies located in the Student Response section.