this is the evaluation of my edutainment project, in this project I had to
create an educational game for kids, containing content of my choice, however
it had to link back to giving some sort of education to children. after 6 weeks
of research, designing and actually creating something, I believe that this
project it finally complete, I have shown my game to others and they believe
adding more to it would make it better, however I believe it is fine as it is
as it IS short game, and there isn't a lot you can teach children about
prime numbers, especially at an early age such as 7 years old, the more
detailed information about prime numbers is given when you are at least doing A
levels, so what I did seems to be fine for now.
My game (as said above) was to teach kids about prime numbers, which I
believe is a very easy subject, yet it was quite difficult to try and think of
questions to ask for such a topic, as there isn't a lot you could ask, so I believe
that the 4 questions in which I included where enough for people to comprehend
properly at what a prime number is, not only that but I did include an explanation
of what a prime number is at the beginning and the end of the game, also subtle
hints throughout the game, which corrects them if they get a previous question
wrong etc. I also added a restart button and answers to the game to make it
seem more like a game and people can keep replaying the game to know what
exactly prime numbers are and so they know if they got all the answers right,
there was meant to be a scoring system, however! Construct 2 messed up on me as
I was working and so I had to restart my entire game, so it didn’t come out as
great as it was before, and so the scoring system was also removed. A menu was
added to make it seem more game like too.
I would say doing the designs for this project was quite a task as you had
quite a lot to think about, such as the topic, what kind of designs are you
going to use for the: text, back ground, characters (optional) etc., also
creating 3 finalised ideas wasn’t such an easy thing either, trying to come up
with the right design, topics and questions for each of the 3 finalised ideas
was tricky, especially since they all had to be different and science and English
are not my strongest subjects. For the research I mainly wrote about what I knew,
I have played many educational games when I was younger so I know what a lot of
them are like and what people do to make the educational games so popular with
kids, which I think is to make it seem fun by adding cool characters, or bright
colours everywhere, this kind of thing attracts the attention of children and
it is all bright and colourful and reminds us of cartoons in a way, so it
attracts attention.
Overall I believe the project was okay, it wasn’t my favourite, I do believe
trying to create a game on construct 2 wasn’t the best thing, as I am not a fan
of construct 2 due to the fact it’s not really easy to understand/ use and also
it keeps breaking, (whether I just can’t use it/ I have bad luck, or the
software is just terrible all together) I would not use it ever again it is
just horrible, however I did manage to make a game in the end after a lot of
struggling, and I seemed to get a lot of positive feedback about my game, which
is a bonus!. The design work was okay, it did take me a while to decide on 3
final concepts and also finalizing my ideas into one major concept, which is
initially the game I created.
Here is the feedback I got from my game, the questions are written in black
and the answers are in the many different colours, each colour represents a
different person who viewed/ played my game, this feedback is to help me later
on in the future, for if I ever create another educational game (hopefully I don’t
have to).
I had only asked very simple questions for my game but it did give me all
the information I was looking for which was great, I mainly asked if the game
was actually education( the whole point of the project is to ACTUALLY make a
working EDUCATIONAL game, meaning it has to actually teach us something, which
I achieved looking at the answers I also asked what aspects people liked the
most, and it seemed that the design was very popular with people and the fact
that people were able to answer each question, this means my game works fully
without any problems, I then continued to ask if there was anything I could
improve, the popular topic was to make the game longer, however as i stated
earlier, I don't think there are any more questions I can add to the game
to make it longer as there is only so much you can do with such a topic. Also a
score system was mentioned, last time I tried to put in a scoring system, it
messed up, so I am hoping to avoid it for now. Next I continued to ask whether
or not it was suitable for kids, those who tested my game seemed to think it
was, seeing as there was nothing inappropriate in my game or no difficult/ long
words, kids will be able to comprehend everything the game says. I later asked if the design was okay for the
game, whether it seemed like a suitable choice