Student Response
Dec 8th, 2011 by bettec
Final Visit:
On our final trip to ARCC, we brought in our final version of School House of Pop. Before we went to the school, our goals for our design were different from how they interacted with it. It was meant to be much more of a game, with competition between the teams to see who could get the the most correct answers and win each round. We provided them with instructions in the beginning and asked them to go through the levels, each taking turns. What we found was that many of them were so focused on the songs and getting the answers right as practice that they weren’t worried about what team won and they weren’t competing with each other as much as we expected them to. From what we observed, their favorite aspect of our game was the music. They are really interested in the latest popular music and were able to rap/sing almost every word of all the songs we played. We aimed out music selection towards what they like to listen to and they didn’t have any complaints about our choices, but requested more options. We also realized that for the most part, they got most of the answers right and seemed to have a pretty good understanding of the material. When the kid answering the questions couldn’t figure it out, the other kids tried to help. Since we didn’t have as many song options as we wanted to have, they finished all the levels before their time period was up. Instead of just sitting there, they started replaying all the levels, listening to the songs again and practicing getting the correct answers some more. We realized that they got more correct answers the second time they did it. Overall, our game was challenging enough for them and the songs were a perfect choice. We all felt like the music captivated their interests enough for them to try and learn what we were trying to teach.
Previous Visits:
During our previous visits, we tried a variety of things to see what aspects of our design we got the best feedback from. Over the course of the project, there are somethings we have kept, like incorporating music and rap lyrics into our design. And some things we have eliminated, like using hardware or a physical aspect to our design. The following ethnography’s describe our two visits to the school where we tested different aspects of design:
Cory Goodenough
Jonny Rio
Cat Bette
Drew Korte