Week 6 has been a busy week for Alice’s Adventure. After quarters last week, we looked towards the feedback we received and how to proceed from there, in which we were helped by the quarters- sitdowns on Monday. In Sit-downs, a faculty member (not one of our instructors) visits our project room during a dedicated half-hour slot and discusses what we should do with our feedback, and give us advise on different topics. We were visited by Heather Kelley and Mike Christel in two sessions, and we had plenty of stuff to chew on once they were done. We hadn’t considered sounds and background music templates in our program, so a few plans regarding that were drafted into our scrum boards. Mike gave us a few sources from which we can gather further information about Computer Science education and standards in teaching, especially in Pennsylvania, which was super helpful. We received further help from John Balash, who set us up with a few events which we could use to our advantage, to find out more about our target demographic.
On Wednesday, a few students and teachers from Cornell School visited the ETC and the Alice Team. They also dropped by our project room for a while and we got to talk to them about what kind of games and tools they use on the computer, and what kind of challenges they faced in Computer Science education. We had a few questions we planned beforehand to ask them, and we got exactly the information we were looking for. We talked to them about our project and showed them a demo. They liked the direction and idea of our project, and wished us well.
We got another opportunity on Friday to get more information from middle school kids, at the Engineer the Future event at the Carnegie Science Center. Teachers and students from dozens of different schools across Allegheny County came down to visit, where a hundred different stalls were set up showcasing the wonders of science and technology. The ETC had one of these stalls, and we got a good chunk of time to show samples of adventure game puzzles and talk about our project. Based on the information that we got out of the previous session, we made a detailed questionnaire to ask the children about, and we eventually got a good number of kids to fill out our surveys. We intend to analyse their responses carefully next week and hopefully find a few interesting points which will help us make choices, especially in those situations where we have to take a design choice. We’d like to give a huge shout-out to ETC Educational Network Coordinator John Balash, who helped us out with all the play-tests.
We also found time to work on designs and mockups for a possible future playtest (Week 8 maybe?). In terms of adventure game mechanics, we thought of four primary blocks and multiple secondary blocks, which students will have to drag and drop to create logic and behaviour for various components on the scene. These are
- Locks and Keys (Boolean logic)
- Passwords (Character strings for input)
- Conversation Trees (Branching flow charts easily editable)
- Timers (Countdown with an input with seconds)
We’ll be working on defining these more clearly throughout next week. Faculty and Client feedback will be vital, to help us mould this better. There will be further updates and hopefully a more concrete tech demo next week. See you then!