Design Challenge #1: Playful Literacy

Challenge

How do you make learning a language/literacy skill playful?

Problem

Topic

Teaching designers fundamental multimedia programming skills

Audience

Professional designers and design students, as well as educators and psychologists who are creating applications and interfaces.

Setting

Higher-education institutions/design schools, professional associations, workplaces/on-the-job training.

Problem

How do we create an approachable learning context for groups of designers with varying experience levels in computer programming so that students will achieve a sufficient enough level of self-efficacy that they will feel able to pursue code-related projects in their own multimedia/interactive work?

Resources

1. Hill, T., Smith, N. D., & Mann, M. F. (1986). Role of Efficacy Expectations in Predicting the Decision to Use Advanced Technologies: The Case of Computers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 72, 307-313.
2. Czajs, S., Charness, N., Fisk, A. D., Hertzog, C., Nair, S. N., Rogers, W. A., & Sharit, J. (2006). Factors Predicting the Use of Technology: Findings from the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE). Psychology and Aging, 21, 333-352.
3. Udama, L., Morrison, G. R. (2007). How do instructional designers use automated instructional design tool? Computers in Human Behavior, 23, 536-553.
4. Downey, A., Elkner, J. & Meyers, C. (n.d.). How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Python Version. Retrieved February 11, 2007 from http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. June 18, 2002. Introduction to Logo Blocks.Retrieved February 26, 2007 from http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/cricket...
6. The Gunakara Sun Systems. (n.d.). Prograph 1.1. Retrieved February 26, 2007 from http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/....

Concept

What are people going to learn? And why? What form will it take?

I intend to teach the fundamentals of multimedia programming to interface designers who have not had much exposure to programming. I will use a graphical programming language that guides players to build simple programs from a limited set of programming blocks. By doing this, players will gain an increased proficiency with programming skills and an increased sense of self-efficacy when approaching problems that require coding. It is hoped that this will enable the users to feel that they can pursue more difficult tasks on their own.

The game I will build is called Alien Pet Shop. The player is the chief mechanic of a funky store that sells unusual, customized pets to discerning customers. The mechanic's job is to build and expand the store's ordering system to allow for different kinds of requests. In the process of working on the store's machine, players will be introduced to important programming concepts suchs as variables, control structures, and functions.

Using the store as a metaphor for an interactive process, users will read the kind of inputs given to them by users. At first, the input will be very simple. Customers will ask for a specific type of pet, such as the "rudbud." The player will then set up a "plan" that will allow for a "type" request to come into the system.

After the request is in the system, the real work begins. The player will add a new "action" to the plan. The action will take the input and perform work to try and get the proper outcome.

The player can edit their actions to work with the kinds of requests that come through. For example, if the customer has asked for a "rudbud," then their action will simply be a condition that asks if the type equals "rudbud" and then returns that pet to the output.

As the player completes the simple challenges, different kinds of orders will start to come in. A customer might ask for a "red" pet. The player will then work with that input and return a set of new choices to the customer, based on which pets are red.

A further advancement will be customizable pets. A customer might ask for a "rudbud" with 5 legs instead of 3, which would require the player to set up a loop that can add legs to the pet based on the type and quantity requested.

By setting up increasingly challenging processes to manage the store, the player, as mechanic, will have to write more and more accommodating "code" to make the system work.

As they progress in complexity, they will see their work on the graphical code editor represented as an actual programming language in the code window. By showing the player multiple syntaxs, they will get used to the idea that the work they are doing in the graphical editor relates directly to the code produced in the code window.

A further advancement would encourage the player to start using the code window for complex scripts, and submitting the to the "machine." This would give the user their first taste of writing code, but would still keep the training wheels of the graphical system handy if they get stuck.

Idea Sketches

Take a look at the gallery.

Purpose

The purpose of this game is for professional interface designers to gain an increased proficiency with programming skills and an increased sense of self-efficacy when approaching problems that require coding. From this starting point, it is hoped that students will feel they can advance farther in programming than they otherwise thought they could have.

Structure

The Main Flow of the Game The main movement in the game begins with a new challenge posed by the fictional clients. In the first few runs, the player is assisted by the Master Mechanic. The MM guides the player through the process of selecting inputs from the order, setting up the plan, and, most crucially, "writing" the code. The MM prompts the player through the early challenges and points the player toward the right tools from a limited set that represent actual coding concepts.

Once the plan is complete and the code has been written, the plan is run. The player can see how the code operates with the input as each step is highlighted as it gets executed (see below.) Then a new challenge is initiated. Eventually, the MM takes a long and well-deserved vacation and the player is left to handle the challenge based on what they've learned.

Model

The Master Mechanic The model for this game is a highly-colorful alien pet shop. The palette for both the game pieces and the rest of the art is a saturated and contrasting, emphasizing fun and the odd funkiness of this futuristic enterprise. The game pieces themselves are large and block-like, and designed to suggest a pairing or an action without much additional prompting.

Taking a look at the attached PDF file (see bottom of this page,) the building of the code becomes apparent. The initial levels are guided by the Master Mechanic and prompts on the menu items, put the pieces themselves fit together consistently through the play of the game. In addition to explicit hints from the MM and implicit hints on the shapes, other elements appear the help guide likely pieces together, so that a user who drags an item around long enough will receive clues as the matching pieces near each other.

By using the simple set of cues, the player begins to see a fully formed program taking shape. This program is represented graphically in the main window, and takes more concrete shape in a side window in actual code that the player can grab, save, and manipulate more expertly as they progress in the game.

Evaluation

In the future, I want to focus on increasing the visual representation of what is happening, particularly in line with the machine/factory metaphor. By showing what actually happens as the pet is selected or constructed, it could reinforce important points along the "plan's" execution path. Increasing this tie to the central metaphor can help visual learners tie down the concepts to their own already sophisticated visual understanding.

Attachment	Size
model.pdf	1010.04 KB

Design Challenge #2: Modifying a Game

Challenge

Can you adapt an existing game to make it a focused teaching experience?

Problem

Topic

Teaching children about the habitats, behaviors and characteristics of animals.

Audience

Reading-age elementary school children.

Setting

Elementary school classrooms, particularly during free periods or group work.

Problem

How can a card game in the style of Apples to Apples be used to help children identify the different attributes associated with a variety of animals?

Resources

1. Apples to Apples. Card game.

Concept

Children will learn about how animals forms and behaviors adapt them to their environments. Using Apples to Apples as a game, a rotating "judge" player will draw an animal card (just as the judge in A2A draws an adjective card). Other players will have, in their hands, traits of animals like color, climate preferences, mode of transport, diet, etc. Players will submit a trait that they think best matches the animal on the table. The judge will pick the traits he or she best thinks matches (maybe more than one, as opposed to one and only one in A2A). The animal and the traits are written down, possibly on a computer, for later discussion and comparison. As the rounds continue, players are encouraged, either on the worksheet on which the rounds are recorded or on the computer screen, to see which traits animals share in common, and start making inferences about similar creatures.

In addition to the inferences made about animals, each of the animal cards could be marked with brief descriptions that point to likely traits. Similarly, the trait cards could point toward animals that are more likely to possess them. This way, players wouldn't need to depend as much on prior knowledge and would be able to construct new knowledge within the confines of the game itself.

See attached desed2sketches.pdf for idea sketches.

Porpoise

The purpose of this game is to teach elementary school children about animals. Specifically, they will learn about how the animals are adapted to their environments by exploring these animals habitats, traits, and behaviors and finding commonalities with similar creatures.

Structure

StructureThe game follows the same progression as Apples to Apples, except that the dealer can pick multiple winners per round and the progress of the game is tracked on a worksheet.

Each player starts out with 5 trait cards. The stack of animal cards is picked up by the dealer and the top card is laid face up on the table.

Each player submits a trait they think is most appropriate. The dealer selects as many cards as he or she thinks matches the animal and writes them down on the worksheet.

A variation I want to test is switching trait and animal cards, so that players hold animals and traits appear in the dealer's deck. I also want to game how many cards a dealer can pick (unlimited, limited to 2 or 3, only one) and see how this affects the game flow.

Model

The model for this project is similar in many ways to that of Apples to Apples. For testing purposes, an equal amount of trait and animal cards were prodeuced, making switching the focus of the game (from animal to trait) as simple as switching decks.

Two versions of the worksheet were also produced, each version reflecting a different possible focus on animals or traits.

Attachment	Size
desed2sketches.pdf	458.1 KB
desed2structure.pdf	180.35 KB

Design Challenge #3: Evaluate the Modified Game

For my game, I originally modified Apples to Apples to work with animals and their behaviors and habitats. The very first play test of this occurred in class, with four of my classmates playing. As much fun as the original game was, though, play was slow and the learning features were a little clunky--recording the animals and their traits clogged up the game play.

The game I came up with after that, based on suggestions from that class, was more like dominoes, specifically the "Mexican Train" variation. The twist I put on it was faithful to my original educational goal of teaching kids about the lives and homes of animals. Each domino had a name and picture of an animal, and a set of four icons that depicted that animal's identity. The icons represented:

• Cold or Warm Climate
• Meat or Plant Eating
• Diurnal or Nocturnal
• Land or Water

The Animal Dominoes

Players were asked to match three of the four traits on tiles on the table to a tile in their hands.

The next play test of the game happened in class with Becky, Laura, Albert, and I playing. I held the lead for a brief period, but Becky won in the end. There was a good consensus that the game was fun and playable--despite several players never having played any version of dominoes before, the rules were easy to explain and everyone picked it up very quickly.

I asked the following questions:

1. Name some herbivores that are active during the day.
2. Name animals active at night that live on land.
3. Name cold weather animals that live in the water.

I did get a couple of correct responses from the group of players, but not everyone answered correctly or at all. This exposed one flaw in the game play--the animal identification can be missed if not emphasized properly in the play.

The next test I ran at home with just my wife, Kelcey, and me. I was interested in seeing if the game was still playable with only two people, which turned out to be just fine. I also emphasized, before play, that she should pay attention to the animals on the cards, and I made a point of mentioning the animals as I played.

In the end, Kelcey got two of the three questions after a little prompting, but there did still seem to be a weakness in that area. Some of the suggestions that came out of that play test were:

• Place the animal pictures in the center of the dominoes, with the icons on both ends. This will feel more like the original game and speed the uptake.
• Find a new rule that emphasizes the animal on each card. For example, require players to make a noise like the animal, make a face like that animal, otherwise imitate the animals, give the animal a name like "Paul the Polar Bear"

Kelcey Playing Animal Dominoes

On the positive side, the game got raves for working with categorization tasks and simple playability. Such are the benefits of living with an educational psychologist.

When considering the game as it stands now, the following principles of James Gee come to mind:

Co-Design

Players are creating the category challenges for themselves and other players, and subtly grouping their hands into real-world animal categories as part of the strategy

Well-Ordered Problem

One of the nice parts of the play in dominoes is that early rounds are very easy to get playing, and the challenges increase as players start holding fewer and fewer dominoes. In this game, that means play happens very quickly up front, but requires closer thought about which animals are more like the played animals as the game reaches its climax.

Pleasantly Frustrating

This is another feature inherent in dominoes that aids the new game. Players frequently experience reversals of fortune as different plays are made. This leads them to have to constantly re-examine their existing animals and those relationships, while keeping the game fresh and interesting.

Information "On-Demand" or "Just In Time"

The domino game piece have everything that a player needs to make the next play right on them. The game in play also has the benefit of making relationships between animals readily apparent by looking at the board. On a number of occasions, I found the play I needed by looking at past plays on the table.

Skills as Strategies

The skill taught by this game is categorizing animals. Using these categories is crucial for winning the game. Finding the cold-weather meat-eating daytime land animal and matching it with the warm-weather meat-eating daytime land animal is both the skill taught and the mechanism behind the game itself.

System Thinking

While the game does not even nearly approach the complexities of our taxonomic system of animal classification, it does require the player to see the board, as a whole, and few it as a series of connections and divergences between like and unalike animals. Within the narrow confines of the game is a system for dividing the natural world, a system that can easily be assessed, during play, by looking at the table and the dominoes in hand.

I would argue that the Well-Ordered Play and Pleasantly Frustrating qualities are at the fore, mostly because of the greatness of the original game. Next, On-Demand Information is at work here rather nicely, with the dominoes holding compact and easily-readable data for players to use. This quality in turn benefits the Skills as Strategies characteristic by enabling players to easily convert their data into action. Finally come Co-Design and System Thinking, which work in tandem as players experiment with different pairings and branchings during the course of the game.

I think this game has a good amount of potential for playful learning. It may take a few rounds to pick up the lessons, and more could be done to clarify the game pieces and emphasize the animals. On the whole, though, it's a fun variation of a successful game.

Design Challenge #4: Math Cookbook

Challenge

Design a lecture or instructional piece for something missing from the MFADT curriculum.

Problem

Topic

Teaching graduate design students the kinds of math they need to do interesting graphics, games, and other computational designs.

Audience

Parsons MFADT students.

Setting

In class or in lab project work.

Problem

What is the best and most useful way to provide Parsons MFADT students with the kinds of math that they need with out getting bogged down in details that do not relate to their needs or work?

Resources

1. Python Cookbook. ActiveState Programmer Network. Retrieved 23 April 2007 <http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Python/Cookbook/>.
2. "Trigonometry Tutorials and Problems." Mathematics Tutorials and Problems (with applets). 30 Apr. 2007 <http://www.analyzemath.com/Trigonometry.html>.
3. "XP Math - Math Topics That Designers Require." XP Math. 30 Apr. 2007 <http://xpmath.com/careers/jobsresult.php?groupID=2&jobID=61>.

Idea Sketches

• recipes
• velocity
• simple equations
• rates
• acceleration
• equations with exponents
• rates of rates
• gravity
• constants
• "wiggling"
• sine and cosine
• parametric equations
• bouncing
• parametric equations
• vector math
• resultant vectors

---

• interaction
• controllable applets
• can modify parameters
• observe

Idea Sketch - Sine Wave: A mock up of an applet that would let designers explore the possibilities of a sine wave graphically.

Concept

My concept is to create an interactive "cookbook" that will allow Parsons MFADT students to explore, test, and create their own interactive or computational pieces using simple but powerful math fragments. The idea is threefold:

1. Organize sets of simple mathematical equations into visual domains as a kind of taxonomy. Equating the equations with visual representations, allow the user to search for the kind of effect they want (rather than by the mathematical taxa). This will create a cookbook style of math excerpts. Concepts like sine waves could be grouped into animal motion (wiggling) for example.
2. In each recipe, show an applet or other interactive model with sliders or other simple inputs that allow the user to manipulate a graphical representation of the equation, etc. while also seeing, in real time, the changes to the equation. This multiple encoding will help emphasize the relationship between the graphical and mathematical.
3. Once the user is satisfied with their settings, allow her or him to save the settings with a comment. This will allow the user to:
   • Save their work
   • See other people's settings and explore what they have done

Purpose

The purpose of the cookbook is to teach DT students about mathematical formulas that can help them achieve desired effects in their interactive and computational work. It should be a persistent and expanding resource for students to use as a reference and repository of collective associations between different math concepts.

Structure

The overall structure of the product is very similar to other community content sites, like the Python Cookbook or instructables. That is, there are individual pages that host particular pieces of information, say about the sine wave function or elasticity functions, that are linked together to form a whole corpus and are supplemented with user responses and other data.

More specifically, each page contains an interface that displays the function as line, in most cases, and shows an example, where applicable, of what that function would look like it it were placed in motion.

The page will also contain keywords that link to this page (as well as others), a list of similar pages (derived implicitly by automated analysis of the keyword linkages), a set of saved settings for the student and other users, so people could go back and explore their experiments, and a threaded list of comments, where users can post more about their experiences.

The pages would be linked together via a search page that allows users to search by keyword. The result of this search would be a graphical result page that would visually show the user what the relevant results looked like. The user could than navigate into the individual pages themselves and begin exploring.

Formutator Search Page

Model

Simple pause, play, rewind and fast-forward buttons would aid study of the function as motion.

Formutator Sine Function Page

Below the graphical display are a set of sliders and numerical readouts that would allow the user to modify useful parameters of the function in order to display different results. The function itself is prominently displayed next to the sliders and changes in response to alterations in the numbers. This provides a multiple-syntax approach to the learning--both the graphical and formulaic representations are provided for the student.

Formutator Cosine Function Page

To the right are the keywords, similar pages, and saved settings of the user and others.

Evaluations

1. Make the search more graphical. Since this is a tool for visual designers, continuing this work to its logical conclusion requires that students should be able to identify the formulas they need, at least in part, on sight. This is not a replacement for the tagging system, which works alongside the visual search and augments the results and the connections between each page.
2. Allow for more narrative. Students are going to want to talk about how they did X, Y, or Z in their own work. This is a valuable resource to add in for future students, so that conversations could be started around the sine function, for example, on how it can be used statically, dynamically, in games, in artwork, etc. Allowing user generated content to augment the existing page is rarely a bad idea. In this case, in fact, it serves the educational purpose by further clarifying the connection of math to the work of designers, based on the work of other designers.