During Week two we faced a delayed client meeting, figured out our target audience, met with various faculty, and brainstormed new ideas.
We were scheduled to meet with our client on Tuesday of this week, but due to an issue at the school, we had to reschedule for Thursday. Our weekly plan was based on receiving further information from that meeting, so we had to quickly adapt our schedule in order to stay busy and on-task. Thus we continued our research into educational games, the Pennsylvania Math Core Standards, and UI concepts for customization, whilst meeting with faculty for further guidance.
Educational Games
We looked into the following games as sources of inspiration
- Mathsnacks.com
- Dragonbox numbers
- 12 a Dozen
- The Counting Kingdom
- Slice Fractions
- Game Over Gopher
- brainpop.com
Pennsylvania Math Standards
The PA math standards are fairly extensive and are divided into multiple topics across grade levels. In order to parse this information, we created a google spreadsheet to help organize the various topics by their grade levels. This spreadsheet can be found here.
Customization Concepts
Though we were unsure the exact age group and math concepts we would target, we knew that customization options would be featured in our application. Feng and Vaishnavi began working on UI and art concepts.
Client Meeting
On Thursday we were able to meet with our client, Audrey. We had many questions for the class’s teacher, Tracey, but she, unfortunately, could not make it. The meeting was still successful and we were able to learn in greater detail our client’s needs.
- The age group of the class is 6-11, grades K-6, and we should focus the game on the older kids.
- Engagement when playing the app is perhaps more important than learning outcomes.
- The teacher plans on incorporating the app into the lesson plan.
Audrey was unfortunately not able to answer all our questions, specifically those about problem areas for the children. So we are currently waiting for an email response from Tracey.
Based on the information we did receive, the team began brainstorming new ideas. Jesse Schell, in our meeting, informed us about good ways of approaching game development for children. He also mentioned that he felt that there aren’t very many geometry based math games.
The team decided to move forward while waiting for more information from our clients. We brainstormed multiple ideas and will begin prototyping next week.
Challenges
Our current challenges:
- We are unsure of the exact problems the children are facing during their current math education.
- We will develop the application for iOS/iPad, but we need to know the exact hardware specifications of the iPads being used at the school.
Next Week
For next week our play is to continue development on prototyping and present our prototypes to the client during our meeting on Tuesday. From that meeting, we expect to be better informed of the children’s problem areas and will adapt are designs or develop new ones to compensate. We expect to have a working paper or digital prototype by the end of next week that we can use to playtest with the children at East Franklin.