Our client was visiting Pittsburgh last week and we got a chance to hear from her how does she feel about the project. iThrive considers this project to be a success based on the lessons we learned and our final games. “One of the important factors for us is that teens were included in the […]
ETC festival gave us the chance to present our work to a large group of audience. The games were played by multiple people, both guests and people from the industry. For our finals we presented the process we went through this semester the lessons that we learned. Some of the things that went well this semester […]
This week was focused on preparing the third and final game, Curiosity. The goal of the game is to reward players for exploration and experimentation. After talking with our client, it seems that material rewards (like gems, treasures, etc) doesn’t help the cause of curiosity. The background story of the game is that a princess […]
This week we had a small playtest session (3 teens). They played the Empathy and Growth Mindset games. When playing Growth Mindset they mentioned that the clay in the game (which you collect whenever you hit a “clay” tile) loses its value since there is so much of it. They started with avoiding the monsters […]
During this week we had some progress regarding the art for Growth Mindset and noted some minor changes needed for the Empathy game. On Saturday ETC had it’s playtest day where various guests tried out our games and gave their feedback. For the Empathy game is was a chance to test basic functions like emotion […]
While work continues on the Empathy game, Miriam has started designing and executing the Growth Mindset game. The main focus of the game is to encourage risk taking, to show the player that just by throwing more effort on the problem isn’t going to solve it and to reward failure. Fear of failure can leave […]
We started the week facing two major presentations: the first is our halves presentation and the second is presenting at the AUI’s STEAM conference for educational games. At the conference we presented our latest digital prototype for the Empathy game. We had the chance of talking with several teachers and educators and get their general […]
As we are approaching the half way mark of our project we have finalized the design for our Empathy game and have started looking into design options for the Growth Mindset game. The main barriers we wanted to tackle were that the part of a teenager’s brain that supposed to enable them to exercise empathy […]
This week we focused on developing and iterating the design for the Empathy game. We decided to focus on empathy as a useful tool for conflict mediation, with a focus on perspective taking as an important part of practicing empathy. Once we had that goal, we started by identifying the essential components of the […]
Now that we’ve changed our target from six games based on psychological concepts to three transformational games that will help teens live them, we needed to take some time for more thorough research. We focused on Curiosity, Growth Mindset, and Empathy. We discovered during playtesting that one of our initial curiosity prototypes also had strong […]
Week 5 included our quarter’s presentation for the faculty. As part of our presentation, we gave an overview of what our client’s current goals and how we intend to achieve them and got feedback on those from the faculty members. Our original goal was to deliver six games related to six different constructs (empathy, curiosity, zest, […]
This week we were preparing for our quarters’ presentation. The main goal was to present what have we been doing so far and define what our goals are. During the past week, we have been working on preparing five different prototypes for three psychological constructs: Kindness, Curiosity and Growth Mindset. We also playtested the […]
Our client, iThrive, belives fully in incorporating teens in the process of making the games. The games themselves need to appeal to teens and help empower them, so it makes sense that we incorporate them in the ideation process. We went to a local after-school program and met with teens ranging between 13-17 years old. […]
For this week we started brainstorming the six different constructs: curiosity, empathy, cooperation, growth mindset and zest. Since our client wanted us to include our own personal experiences in the process and incorporate what does each one means to us. iThrive also provided us with design guidelines explaining what each one of them means when […]
Mindset – Entertainment Technology Center CMU from rony kahana on Vimeo.
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