A children's e-learning game to engage them to learn more about space exploration by teaching them about NASA JPL missions.
Space is a subject that engages children and encourages them to ask questions about the world around them. Through learning about space, children can apply and build on concepts they have already learned and develop an understanding of the vast world beyond Earth. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is humanity's leading center for exploring where humans cannot yet reach.
Create an educational app that helps students learn about space through fun and interactive games. Astro allows players to explore new worlds and discover videos, mini-games and topics about space.
Because of the time constraints of this project, we conducted two folds of research, secondary research and a competitive analysis with other companies in the problem space. We started with secondary research to user interviews to the effectiveness of gamification in education and identify motivations of students. A competitive analysis was then conducted to analyze other possible competitors that offer a similar service and identify any patterns or trends.
Gamification theory in education states that students learn best when they have goals, targets, and achievements involving game-based elements such as:
From our research on gamification, we understand that there are some main objectives of it:
When education and gaming mix, it allows students to continue to be interested in their education and give them more control in their learning. Some benefits include:
For the scope of this project, we focused on 6th to 8th grade students to determine their motivations when it comes to learning. Students can be motivated by a variety of factors within their learning environment. Some key factors include: 1) Attribution (how do I feel about it), 2) Goal (what will I achieve out of it), and 3) Self-determination (can I do it on my own and well related to my peers).
"Studies of students' goal orientations generally find that the adoption of task goals is associated with more adaptive patterns of learning than is the adoption of ability goals, including the use of more effective cognitive strategies, a willingness to seek help when it is needed, a greater tendency to engage in challenging tasks, and more positive feeling about school and oneself as a learner" - Motivation and Middle School Students by Lynley Hicks Anderman and Carol Midgley
Gaming in education has been around for quite awhile and each company does it differently. We reviewed three services, Playground Physics, Google Earth, and NASA Visual Explorer. Below we listed the strengths and weaknesses between each of the services, which will later help inform our design decisions.
We used the data from the secondary research and competitive analysis to create a persona, Samantha Lopez, to represent a part of our target users. By creating a fictional persona, we were able to personify the needs and wants of the target users into a single person. As a middle schooler, Samantha wants a way to interact with engaging educational content because she finds her classwork boring. For the scope of this project, we had to cut down on some processes because of the time constraint.
To get a better sense of game design, we looked for inspiration from other games. We focused on games that are targeted for younger audiences that are either educational, MMO style, or both. By looking at these games, we understood that have the ability to customize, gain achievements, and have some sort of NPC was crucial in making the game fun for our target users.
Using our research and looking at our inspiration, we started building out the key pages needed for our persona to complete her goal. Astro is built as a tablet application because our research showed that these middle scholars today are using tablets to play their games. Our goal for the design was to make it easy and simple to set up.
After an initial round of usability testing off of the low-fidelity wireframes, changes were made to the current design. Building off of the low-fidelity wireframe, we built the high fidelity wireframe and the first iteration prototype. Below is a video of the final design.
It was a fun challenge designing with another teammate remotely to work on a project with a two week deadline. Working with another, we learned to respectively consider each other's opinions and offer critique to reasons why we would design certain things for our respective sections. Because we had a time constrain, we had to skip some steps in the design process. If we had more time, we would want to do more user research, specifically user interviews, in the early stages to understand what middle school students are looking for in a game. We also wanted to do more rounds of usability testing after completing our prototype. We had one teacher try out the application to determine if it's something students would want, but having more would allow us to get other perspectives.
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}