1st Playtest with Kids

On Monday, we had our first playtest with kids at the Children’s Museum. It was a rough build for which we had developed all of our assets in less than 2 weeks, a slice of our intended whole experience that was intended to walk a player through every interaction of exploring the origin of one common grocery item. In this case, eggs.

Now, the first few weeks of our project included a good deal of research into how 4-6 year olds interact with our technology. But watching actual kids try to play our actual game (with a fair amount of both failure and success) was informative in a way that any amount of research could never be. As a team, we’d never worked with a demographic so young before, so having this shared experience where we have seen, live, how kids use their hands with an iPad, and how they WANT to interact with this technology, really helps us conceptualize and plan for further iteration.

Major takeaways included that we need to do more to direct the player’s attention, include a few more tutorial graphics and spoken words, and build our interactions more solidly around what kids want to do.